About the Author

Marta Gutman is associate professor of architectural and urban history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York and visiting professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City College of New York. She is a licensed architect.

Reviews

"A City for Children is a monumental achievement about non-monumental architecture. The book is monumental because it explores an entire century of children's architecture in a single place, Oakland, California. Unlike most monuments, however, buildings for children remain largely invisible in our cities and histories. Gutman's achievement is to uncover the complex landscape designed and re-designed to support children, explaining how these hidden spaces functioned and why they matter."-- "Planning Perspectives"

"A City for Children should generate exciting new avenues for historical inquiry. Most importantly, it points to some innovative ways to conceptualize various educational and social welfare landscapes of the past and to utilize more spatial, visual, and cartographic evidence to deepen our understanding of how historical space and human experience interacted. The extensive use of illustrations as part of the narrative offers a primer for how to use maps, photographs, and building plans to interpret the changing social relations of a neighborhood. Historians of education interested in how schools shaped, and were shaped by, their social and physical surroundings, as well as children in classrooms, will likely find much of interest in Gutman's methodology."-- "History of Education Quarterly"

"An outstanding book, based on creative research and innovative historical framing, A City for Children is the most comprehensive and nuanced study of the cultural landscape of charitable institutions. Gutman's expertise in the history of childhood, gender studies, and architecture make this an ambitious and path-breaking work."--Carla Yanni, Rutgers University

"As is so often the case, the future lies latent in the past. A City for Children holds up a rich layer of the past for scrutiny and for our collective betterment, vividly demonstrating the power of history for understanding both the past on its own terms and the present through recourse to the past. Scholars of contemporary children's environments are especially encouraged to seek out this text."-- "Children, Youth and Environments Journal"

"In A City for Children, Marta Gutman explores how charitable institutions housed in repurposed buildings attempted to replace 'damaged' childhoods with 'good' ones. She documents in meticulous detail the buildings and spaces that the women of Oakland created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to take care of kids. . . . This is a well-written book, more accessible than many social histories because Gutman mixes theoretical references to Foucault with colloquial language. . . . She pays attention to the intersection of economic, political, and architectural history, as when she acknowledges the connection between real estate cycles and the ways women saved many places from speculative development. Gutman also weaves toged1er the stories of whites and blacks, native- and foreign born, and Catholics and Protestants. The book's style and comprehensive coverage make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of urban history and women's history."
-- "Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians"

"Remarkable. Based on extensive research, A City for Children is a sophisticated historical investigation into a wide range of charitable institutions built by women in Oakland, California, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primarily to serve the needs of children. Gutman is particularly attentive to the racial politics that informed the development of these institutions, and like all of her work, this book promises to inform current public policy debates, not just about Oakland, but also about American cities in general."--Abbie Van Slyck, Connecticut College

"The central motif of A City for Children is that a charitable landscape developed as a spatial entity with various "nodes" in a shifting urban network. Gutman reconstructs the presence, appearance, and experience of institutions, most of which are now long gone. Using archives, oral histories, photographs, fire insurance maps, city directories, and census and tax records, Gutman gives spatial coherence to a story that is by nature fragmentary. Her own architectural renderings and schematic drawings of neighborhoods are especially helpful in reconstituting a story that is simultaneously architectural, urban, and social."-- "CAA Reviews"

"What makes this book so important, ultimately, is the contribution it makes, as a work of history, to our present and our future. Through its consideration of the everyday landscape, the interconnections between buildings and people, it recovers the past, warts and all, peopled by intensely human, hopeful, and dedicated women, flawed figures who supported and worked within structures of inequality and racism. It is a story of success and failure, of conflict and change, of the relationship between private effort and public responsibility. A City for Children provides a framework for understanding the importance and possibilities of preservation, repurposing, and grassroots reform."-- "Building & Landscapes"

"Gutman puts forward an expansive view of the built environment that pays close attention to the ways that reforms in the urban environment and changes in attitudes toward childhood crossed with architecture, interiors, and material culture. . . . A City for Children offers . . . a point of view that asks us to penetrate facades and closely look at what happened in the streets to understand the social forces that shaped the landscape of society."-- "The Architect's Newspaper"