Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities
Nov 2010 · Simon and Schuster
3,4star
5 reviewsreport
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256
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About this eBook
In this new work, prizewinning author, professor, and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski returns to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live, just as he did in the acclaimed bestsellers Home and A Clearing in the Distance. In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique.
Makeshift Metropolis describes how current ideas about urban planning evolved from the movements that defined the twentieth century, such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the seminal ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. If the twentieth century was the age of planning, we now find ourselves in the age of the market, Rybczynski argues, where entrepreneurial developers are shaping the twenty-first-century city with mixed-use developments, downtown living, heterogeneity, density, and liveliness. He introduces readers to projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Yards in Washington, D.C., and, further afield, to the new city of Modi’in, Israel—sites that, in this age of resource scarcity, economic turmoil, and changing human demands, challenge our notion of the city.
Erudite and immensely engaging, Makeshift Metropolis is an affirmation of Rybczynski’s role as one of our most original thinkers on the way we live today.
Makeshift Metropolis describes how current ideas about urban planning evolved from the movements that defined the twentieth century, such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the seminal ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. If the twentieth century was the age of planning, we now find ourselves in the age of the market, Rybczynski argues, where entrepreneurial developers are shaping the twenty-first-century city with mixed-use developments, downtown living, heterogeneity, density, and liveliness. He introduces readers to projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Yards in Washington, D.C., and, further afield, to the new city of Modi’in, Israel—sites that, in this age of resource scarcity, economic turmoil, and changing human demands, challenge our notion of the city.
Erudite and immensely engaging, Makeshift Metropolis is an affirmation of Rybczynski’s role as one of our most original thinkers on the way we live today.
Ratings and reviews
3,4
5 reviews
A Google user
- Flag inappropriate
11 January 2011
Pros:
Concise and easy to read review of planning history in the US and an interesting way of presenting various city planning ideas of the 19th and 20th century. It is a good historical review for the lay person.
Cons:
The book is out of touch with the current reality of city planning in the 21st century, particularly outside the US in places such as China and the Middle East. This reality is characterized by vast and rapid development and creation of new “sustainable” and “technologically savvy” cities from scratch (such as Dongtan, China “the world’s first large-scale eco-city” and Masdar city in UAE, “the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-emission city”). Whether or not these cities live up to their own names and claims (something to be left to the future to demonstrate or refute), it is crucial to acknowledge them as part of the 21st century city planning movement, especially in this book that makes such a claim with its title.
I think the book is a fascinating read but it is another 20th century book (one would expect a book like this to be published in the early 1980s not in 2010!!) as it completely disregards what’s happening now around the world, which will define city planning now and into the future. The book is concerned with the past planning movement and only restricted to the US context. Its title makes big claims but does not deliver. It makes more sense to change its title to: “cities of the past: reflections on city planning in the US” or something along these lines. It is unfortunate to see books of this caliber still being produced now.
A Google user
- Flag inappropriate
24 January 2012
excellent
About the author
Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Home and the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance, as well as The Biography of a Building, The Mysteries of the Mall, and Now I Sit Me Down. The recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
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