City Life: Urban Expectations In A New World - Hardcover

Rybczynski, Witold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684813025 ISBN 13: 9780684813028

Publisher: Scribner, 1995

Synopsis

A architectural perspective on urban development explains how cities have evolved into the individual locales of the present, focusing on places as diverse as New York City, Charleston, Chicago, and New Orleans. 40,000 first printing. BOMC & QPB Alt. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Witold Rybczynski is Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

In this elegant, concise and unfortunately unillustrated historical survey of North American urbanism, architectural historian Rybczynski (The Most Beautiful House in the World) tells more than the familiar story of the life and death of American cities. Resisting the depressingly common equation of grime and dilapidation to urban authenticity, Rybczynski argues that "city" and "suburban" are categories as polemical as they are descriptive. There are familiar villains here?Rybczynski assails the cul-de-sac entanglements of cookie-cutter subdivisions, and his assessment of the 1950s public housing projects that grafted European modernist ideas onto the North American cityscape with tragic results for the poor is withering. But there are also unexpected heroes, most notably the garden suburbs of the 1920s and '30s (including his own neighborhood, Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill), which combined good design with strong civic consciousness to create urban spaces outside the traditional city. While Rybczynski admits a nostalgic preference for old-fashioned downtowns, he acknowledges that in most places, America's inextinguishable urban impulse has migrated elsewhere.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gazing at elegant Paris, a visitor from North America plaintively asked her companion, "Why aren't our cities like that?" Fortunately that companion was Rybczynski, an astute architectural historian whose knowledge and sparkling writing (e.g., Home, 1986) ensure that his readers will no longer think of their American cities as apres-teardowns in progress. Rather, they might reimagine their cities' potential for beauty and sociability in light of this history of urban development, from the first planned towns, Philadelphia and Williamsburg, to the chaotic sprawls of Houston and Los Angeles. Deftly conveying what planners expected their new towns to become, Rybczynski commands a wealth of trenchant detail that reveals bucolic attitudes (e.g., the American penchant for naming streets after trees) or evolving architectural fashions, such as the faddish "urban renewal" movement of the 1950s. An early reform that achieved aesthetic success, the "City Beautiful" movement of the 1900s, exemplifies periodic civic self-examinations. Rybczynski's able perceptions illuminate all those developments, making this fascinating reading trip from de Tocqueville's observations to the present exurbs both exhilarating and rueful by turns. Gilbert Taylor

Architectural and urban historian Rybczynski (The Most Beautiful House in the World, LJ 4/1/89) has something to say about the shape of American cities, how they got that way, and how they inevitably contrast with their counterparts in Europe given the development of this country and our distincitve set of values. In succinct, accessible style, he moves from the flourishing of towns and cities in Europe to Tocqueville's assessment of the New World's urban efforts, to a sharp condemnation of urban planning in the last decades as a violation of America's values of spaciousness, choice, and self-sufficiency. At times the book seems a bit breezy, but Rybczynski can toss of terrific insights, e.g., conditions in the New World "gave American towns an independence of spirit, but also reinforced the general assumption that urban self-sufficiency was was the normal state of affairs"?which was certainly not true in the rest of the world and, he points out, has created some of the problems we have today. A fine book; recommended for most collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684813025
• ISBN 13: 9780684813028
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256