Join Owen Hatherley at The Hastings Bookshop on Thursday 25th at 18:00 to discuss his journey through New York, DC, and the spectre of the social democratic American Dream.

About the Book: A walk through the remnants of a social democratic America, and an argument about its future.

In the 1960s, a novel ideology about cities, and what was best for them, emerged in New York. Pushing against the state planning of the time, it held that cities were at their best when they were driven from the bottom-up and when organic, unplanned processes were allowed to run their course, in a spontaneous “ballet of the street”. Cities were at their worst, however, when the state stepped in, demolishing lively old neighbourhoods and erecting giant, sterile, empty “projects”. This book uses the method of this ideology ― walking ― to test how true it actually is about the “capital of the twentieth century”, New York City, with a brief interlude in the capital, Washington DC.