Summer Reading: The Power Broker
Why Robert Caro's epic biography of Robert Moses matters to the Triangle today.
The CITYBUILDER Book Club is taking the month of July off -- but we will be back in August with a whopper! We're going to tackle The Power Broker, Robert Caro's epic biography of Robert Moses.
Why it matters to NC today
The Power Broker is very much a monument of a prior era of urban planning, but it reveals timeless patterns of how politics and policy intersect to make infrastructure decisions that shape communities. Grand new parks in central Raleigh and Cary are a testament to the placemaking power of parks, something that Moses understood early in his career.
We might think that the Moses era of unbridled, toll-funded highway expansion is a relic of the mid-20th century -- yet at this very moment there are still bulldozers chopping away at trees between Garner and Knightdale to extend the Outer Loop and cement (as Mo…
