Robert Beauregard

Robert A. Beauregard, professor emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, is one of the theorists who has thought most about the discourse of the city: not only what happens to cities but how what happens to them is told. Trained at Cornell, he taught earlier at Pittsburgh, Rutgers and the New School, and has edited central journals of the discipline.

Voices of Decline (1993) is his main work. It analyses half a century of discourse about the decline of American cities, from the post-war period to the 1980s, and shows that decline was not only a fact, the loss of population and industry, but a narrative with which American society managed its anxieties about race, class and order, and which legitimised policies such as urban renewal and the flight to the suburbs. When America Became Suburban (2006) completes the argument: post-war suburbanisation was the spatial form of the short American century, the era of prosperity and hegemony between 1945 and the 1970s.

In Planning Matter (2015) he turned to Bruno Latour's actor-network theory and argued that planning acts with things, drawings, maps, buildings, and not only with people, and in Cities in the Urban Age (2018) he proposed a reading of the contemporary city through its contradictions, wealth and poverty, destruction and sustainability, control and disorder. He is a central voice in American planning theory.