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A review by elpanek
City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World by Witold Rybczynski
4.0
City Life provides readers in 2017 (or thereabouts) with two kinds of pleasure. First, there is the pleasure of learning about why cities are the way they are. More specifically, Rybczynski focuses on elucidating why cities are laid out the way they are and how they grew. There are brief allusions to the social character of cities, but maybe not as many as you would expect from a book with the title "City Life." Rybczynski is an architect and a scholar, but he writes like a historian of urban planning. In fact, many of the book's best insights are borrowed from city planners, such as the insight (from planner Kevin Lynch) that cities conform to one of three conceptual models: the "cosmic" (in which the spatial layout of city elements is symbolic, an outgrowth of religious rituals and beliefs), the "practical" (city as machine), and the "organic" (think London or Boston: disorderly, meandering, evolving in an ad-hoc fashion). Rybczynski's historical account focuses primarily on North American cities and their connections to older European cities. It's a whirlwind account, not as thorough as hardcore urban scholars might desire, though he stops to consider a few underappreciated cities like Annapolis and Chicago's short-lived "White City."
The second pleasure comes from how spectacularly wrong Rybczynski is about the future of cities. It's not really his fault. Predicting the future of large-scale human endeavors is a fool's game, though the failed guesses tell you plenty about the time at which they were formulated while reminding you of how quickly things can change. At least Rybczynski wasn't actually designing a city, unlike planner and perennial punching-bag Le Corbusier who, it seems we can all agree, did as much to ruin the urban landscape as anyone.
The book was written in the mid-1990's, a time during which North American urban centers were in steep decline and "white flight" to the suburbs had been happening for so long that it became taken for granted. Rybczynski essentially says that downtowns are not and will not be where city life - that eclectic mix of people, ideas, commerce, and art that define civic existence - resides. He's not so pessimistic as to predict the downfall of civic life as we knew it. This isn't the kind of self-righteous dystopian screed that predicts doom mostly just to give us the pleasure of shaking our fists at someone - corporate fat cats, politicians keen on social engineering, etc. Instead, he says that civic life lives on, and will continue to live on, in shopping malls and suburban sprawl.
I'm all for unorthodox arguments, especially if they help me to appreciate something I'd written off a long time ago. Still, I couldn't help but chuckle and shake my head as Rybczynski praised malls for their orderliness and cleanliness, claiming that they were the most plausible heir to the legacy of Parisian promenades. As I read the book, The New York Times chronicled the utter collapse of the suburban shopping mall while in The Atlantic, Richard Florida lamented the forced exodus of African Americans to rundown suburbs. Reading City Life made me happy Rybczynski was wrong about the ascendance of shopping malls, made me eager to see the next chapter in the development of American cities at a time when we're thinking less about efficiency and more about creating shared space, about reversing gentrification, about increasing bike lanes and affordable housing. Planners, developers, and citizens will try not to repeat the mistakes of the past, though that's no guarantee that they won't make new ones. Still, it's useful to read this book if for no other reason than to renew your faith that America (or at least parts of America) can reverse its course.
The second pleasure comes from how spectacularly wrong Rybczynski is about the future of cities. It's not really his fault. Predicting the future of large-scale human endeavors is a fool's game, though the failed guesses tell you plenty about the time at which they were formulated while reminding you of how quickly things can change. At least Rybczynski wasn't actually designing a city, unlike planner and perennial punching-bag Le Corbusier who, it seems we can all agree, did as much to ruin the urban landscape as anyone.
The book was written in the mid-1990's, a time during which North American urban centers were in steep decline and "white flight" to the suburbs had been happening for so long that it became taken for granted. Rybczynski essentially says that downtowns are not and will not be where city life - that eclectic mix of people, ideas, commerce, and art that define civic existence - resides. He's not so pessimistic as to predict the downfall of civic life as we knew it. This isn't the kind of self-righteous dystopian screed that predicts doom mostly just to give us the pleasure of shaking our fists at someone - corporate fat cats, politicians keen on social engineering, etc. Instead, he says that civic life lives on, and will continue to live on, in shopping malls and suburban sprawl.
I'm all for unorthodox arguments, especially if they help me to appreciate something I'd written off a long time ago. Still, I couldn't help but chuckle and shake my head as Rybczynski praised malls for their orderliness and cleanliness, claiming that they were the most plausible heir to the legacy of Parisian promenades. As I read the book, The New York Times chronicled the utter collapse of the suburban shopping mall while in The Atlantic, Richard Florida lamented the forced exodus of African Americans to rundown suburbs. Reading City Life made me happy Rybczynski was wrong about the ascendance of shopping malls, made me eager to see the next chapter in the development of American cities at a time when we're thinking less about efficiency and more about creating shared space, about reversing gentrification, about increasing bike lanes and affordable housing. Planners, developers, and citizens will try not to repeat the mistakes of the past, though that's no guarantee that they won't make new ones. Still, it's useful to read this book if for no other reason than to renew your faith that America (or at least parts of America) can reverse its course.