Age of Enterprise, a Social History of Industrial America - Thomas C. Cochran - Paperback Book

An ambitious account of patterns in home ownership and the use of homes over fifty-odd years in Chicago, City of Dreams places particular importance on the symbolic “imagined landscape” (136) of Chicago, particularly the single-family home with its fringe of green. It attempts to explain not just the material consequences of this landscape, but also how the single-family owned home came to represent autonomy, class stability, and gendered authority. As such, City of Dreams draws a differently contoured map of modernity than that of Harvey’s Paris. Where Harvey emphasizes the grand public symbols of imperial Paris – the boulevards and the market – Garb focuses on the more enclosed space of the single-family home and its sewage hookup. Infrastructure and its discontents are key themes of modernity, elucidated through Garb’s apt use of the beginnings of modern mass media: real estate journals, advertisements, pamphlets and other promulgators of a laboriously acquired dream home.