Fortunately, a traveling exhibition, now closed, is well documented in a book of the same name. Assembled in its pages is a diverse selection of efforts by photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, architects, and planners to make sense of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles between 1960 and 1980.

This period was characterized by an array of tumultuous social and political changes. Certain transformations moved at a lurching pace, from deindustrialization, large-scale planning, and the periodic destruction of historic buildings to the flight from the inner city by the white middle class. Others hit like explosions, including demonstrations surrounding civil rights and the war in Vietnam and other political clashes.