Berkeley Planning Journal

Robert Alter's statement that the "runaway growth of the city effected certain fundamental transformations in the nature of urban experience" comes as no surprise to city planners. Those same social convulsions spurned the creation of the modern profession of city planning. Alter, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, however, is focused not on the policy response to rapid urbanization, but the literary one. His beautifully written 2005 book Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel traces the evolution of the novel "as a searching response to the felt new reality of the European city."