The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 March 1998
by Witold Rybczynski
This book takes the reader on a historical tour of North American city design. It is an excellent history of our cities, and helps explain why they look the way they do, especially in comparison to European cities. Rybczynski avoids in-depth analysis while telling us the facts behind the design elements so common in the New World. Large urban parks, grid street patterns, urban shopping districts, are described and many examples are cited; some that work and some that have failed. In describing the state of cities today, though, the author reveals his own political bent. (But, so do I.) Urban problems, such as panhandlers, are lightly touched upon, and laid at the feet of "overzealous individual rights advocates". Rybczynski ends by hailing shopping malls as the new American downtown. Here, I found him surprisingly uncritical of this homogenizing factor in urban life, its surrender of public space to corporate control, and his evidence to the contrary somewhat weak. Despite this, the book is a good overview of American urban development over the past four centuries.
Also by Rybczynski: [A Clearing in the Distance] [One Good Turn] [Home]