Grady Clay's article in Horizon Magazine (1959)

This past week, CNU announced Grady Clay as one of the two recipients of this year's Athena Award, honoring outstanding work in laying the foundation for the New Urbanism movement. Among new urbanist insiders, Clay is best known for a prescient 1959 article in Horizon Magazine, Metropolis Regained, that critiqued the hollow, highway-connected, Futurama-inspired contemporary vision of the city and described an inchoate rediscovery (primarily among journalists and critics) of the timeless traditional view of the city. In words described as “eerily similar" to the Charter of the New Urbanism, which followed more than 35 years later, Clay defined the principles of a group he identified as New Urbanists. “We believe in the city, they would say, not in tearing it down. We like open space, but hold that too much of it is just as bad as too little. We want that multiplicity of choice that the city has always offered, but is now in danger of losing,” wrote Clay. “I can only say that all great movements start in murmurs and that I can hear murmurs.”

Download the article, in full, at the bottom of this post. Clay will receive the CNU Athena Award at CNU 17 in Denver, Colorado.