Design
The Best of 'City Makers: Global Shifts'
Which of the innovations covered in our series will prove transformative?
After some 70 articles surveying urban innovation from Accra to Utrecht, Hyderabad to Tokyo, the City Makers: Global Shifts series came to an end in a place that will seem familiar to CityLab’s U.S. readers—the archetypal suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania.
Levittown was the model for the car-oriented, production-house suburbs that proliferated in the United States for several decades following World War II. The town and its sister development in the state of New York were major innovations of the postwar era (they garnered homebuilder William J. Levitt the cover of Time in 1950), which reminds us that the term “innovation” shouldn’t always be taken as a wholly positive accolade.