Forthcoming in 2007 from The University of Tennessee Press

This book will interpret the life of a city through the observation and analysis of its natural and manmade resources. Neither an architectural guidebook nor a social history, it will make use of architecture to evoke the image of a distinctive culture at distinctive time and in a distinctive place.

List of Chapters

Prologue:	The Pre-Industrial Landscape: Primarily a discussion of the exploration of Birmingham's geology
Chapter 1:	Successful Experiments: Planning the city and early experiments in local iron-making
Chapter 2:	Building Furnaces History: History of the principal iron-making companies
Chapter 3:	Shaping the Land for Residences: Primarily a study of one residential developer: Robert Jemison, Jr.
Chapter 4:	Depression in the City of Perpetual Promise: Emphasis on worker housing
Chapter 5:	The Setting for Civil Rights: Explores the new layers of meaning overlaid on downtown buildings during the civil-rights struggle
Chapter 6:	The Rise to Prominence of the Medical Center
Epilogue:	The Post-Industrial Landscape

Narrative

Land speculators, town boosters, and immigrant furnace makers created Birmingham amid the wild excesses of late-19th -century laissez-faire capitalism. The city arose from a singular geology of close-quartered, iron-laden mountains and coal-floored valleys. Its provincial captains of heavy industry produced the cheapest pig iron in the world.

While the city thrived on industrial experimentation, it found itself lacking in social conscience. After initially explosive growth, Birmingham became the scene of cyclically unfulfilled expectations, with a production economy endlessly touted as a global juggernaut but never quite able to close the deal. Reading its man-made landscapes and architecture, one finds an environment of extremes: nationally vilified racial flashpoints around the Trailways Bus Station and 16th Street Baptist Church, idyllic, hermetic suburbs “over the mountain,” and belching smokestacks now given way to an antiseptic medical center.

Becoming the instrument of absentee owners and unable to achieve the industrial greatness promised by its early label as the “Magic City,” Birmingham became moody and belligerent and the most racially divided city in America. When the Great Depression arrived, it floored what one author has called the “ Steel City with a Glass Jaw.” And while World War II produced an Indian summer of profitability for local industry, it also ushered in the period of social upheaval that would make Birmingham into the centroid of American racial conflict and a pariah on the American civic landscape. Amid the catharsis of the Civil Rights Movement, the sprawling University of Alabama medical center replaced heavy industry as the principal employer and the Ku Klux Klan and ironically titled Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Conner were replaced by a pragmatic if not idyllic social equality.