Makeshift Metropolis - by Witold Rybczynski (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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, A Clearing in the Distance, and Now I Sit Me Down. 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.

Review Quotes

""Makeshift Metropolis" is a deceptively slender distillation of some of the best thinking of one of the best thinkers about cities and urban planning. It's a terrific meditation on the past, present, and future of cities--a critical subject now that human life, increasingly, is urban life."--David Owen, author of "Green Metropolis"

""Makeshift Metropolis" is a wonderful book. It shows us how cities have been shaped by an unplanned dance between urban planners and the demands of ordinary consumers. Rybczynski is the ideal expositor of urban design, blessed with an abundance of inside knowledge."--Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Harvard University

"Impressive... [Rybczynski] writes with disarming ease... Our finest architecture critic."--Francis Morrone, "Wall Street Journal"

"Rybczynski offers a glimpse of an urban future that might very well serve as a template for cities around the world... Instructive and always engaging... He not only writes about what people want from their cities, he inspires the reader to imagine the possibilities."--"Publishers Weekly"