The City is the People

The 1962 second edition of Henry S. Churchill's book The City is the People features a re-designed cover by the Strimbans (Robert & Jack). The updated design includes lettering with interlocking text and a cinematic photo collage that alludes to recent trends in pop culture styling along with futurist thinking, targeting a younger crowd and riding the wave of the New Urbanism movement. The overlapping characters in the title lettering are similar to popular album covers of the time and a potential reference to Joe Caroff's poster design for the recently released film “West Side Story,” which features the failings of urban projects as a backdrop to the narrative. 

Churchill was inspired to write The City is the People in 1945 to address urban renewal and the destruction it was causing to neighborhoods and their existing character. Urban renewal was a method used by federal and local governments to clear “blighted” or otherwise low-income neighborhoods to create new districts, usually based on economic interests. Churchill claimed that the bland, lifeless buildings that replaced the former neighborhoods lacked the defining characteristics and culture that existed there before - the essence of the people. 

Republishing this book in 1962 with the updated design coincided with the momentum built by activists such as Jane Jacobs and others in the New Urbanism movement who challenged the current status quo, which had culminated up to that point. New public interest, especially from the youth, sought to find a new way forward after witnessing the destructive effects of policies such as the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and urban planners like Robert Moses, whose actions destroyed communities.

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• Shearer, Martha. "A new way of living: West Side Story, street dance and the New York musical." Screen 56, no. 4 (2015): 450-470.
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• Heller, Steven. “The Daily Heller: The Most Prolific Designer You’ve Never Known.” PRINT Magazine, August 24, 2021. https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-the-most-prolific-designer-you-ve-never-known/.
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