When I was twenty-two, I made an urban tour. It was thanks to a traveling scholarship awarded by the Canadian federal government to one student from each of the country’s six schools of architecture. Together we visited more than a dozen major cities in Canada and the United States. It was a memorable trip, not just because I made a lifelong friend—the Vancouver architect Bing Thom—but also because I was encouraged to look more closely at my urban surroundings.
The stated purpose of the scholarship was to study housing, and we visited an apartment building on Philadelphia’s Ritten-house Square, suburban houses in Marin County, public housing in Toronto and Chicago, and renovated slums in Baltimore. It made me appreciate the richness—and the complexity—of North American cities. The previous summer I had been to Europe. I had been impressed by Rome, London, and Paris—especially Paris—but it was obvious that our cities were different from what I had seen there. If European cities seemed like beautiful architectural museums, our cities were more like unfinished building sites where each generation was free to try its hand.
We were eager to have our turn. I think the first book I read on urban planning was Victor Gruen’s The Heart of Our Cities. I don’t remember exactly what it was that prompted me to buy it—it wasn’t a course text. The author’s suggestion that downtown should be redesigned must have been appealing to a budding architect like me. I was probably also attracted by the dramatic combination of alarm and resolve in the subtitle: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure.
In what follows I am more interested in looking at how our cities have become the way they are—or, more precisely, have not become what we expected them to be—than in looking for crises or imagining diagnoses and cures. This is a book about cities as they are, not as they might be. It is also about cities’ evolution, for I’m convinced that our undistinguished record of the last fifty years in building cities and towns stems at least in part from a willful ignorance of our urban past. At the same time, this record is also the result of our inability to anticipate the new technological and social forces that came to bear on our urban condition: the automobile, air travel, electronic communications. There is no such thing as perfect foresight, of course, so we can never plan infallibly, but we can face the urban future with modesty and an approach tempered by a knowledge of earlier successes and failures. In order to understand where we’re going, it’s necessary to know where we’ve been.
The opportunity to write about urbanism was presented to me first by a number of editors whose encouragement I would like to acknowledge: William Whitworth of The Atlantic Monthly (in which a part of Chapter 9 originally appeared as an article); the helpful Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books; The Public Interest’s Nathan Glazer, whose urban writings I have always admired; and Marilyn Minden of The New York Times. Some of the ideas in this book were initially explored in articles and reviews in City Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, Queen’s Quarterly, and Saturday Night. Paula Deitz and Susan Cohen’s kind invitation to speak at a Smith College symposium spurred me to reflect on the design of New England towns. Jerry Herron of Wayne State University invited me to Detroit to participate in a panel on “The City in the Twenty-first Century” that gave me useful firsthand experience of the volatile state of American urban politics.
The University of Pennsylvania has proved a congenial academic setting for pursuing my interest in urbanism; my thanks to Dean Patricia Conway of the Graduate School of Fine Arts and to Peter D. Linneman of the Wharton School. I would also be remiss in not acknowledging the support of two eminent urban scholars, Martin and Margy Meyerson, for whom the university chair I hold is named.
Shirley Hallam is my first and truest reader, and she has offered equal doses of skepticism and encouragement at the appropriate times. John Lukacs—now a neighbor—kindly reviewed my work, and his thoughtful observations were much appreciated. Stacy Schiff took time away from her own writing to cast a seasoned editor’s eye on the manuscript. Carl Brandt, agent and friend, helped me to clarify my ideas when the book was still a vague intuition; he was a sympathetic sounding board throughout. Thanks to Iris Tupholme of Harper-Collins in Toronto. At Scribner, the energetic Nan Graham provided sterling editorial advice and support, and got me out of a few dead ends; Nancy Inglis did a fine job of copy editing.
W.R.
Hemmingford, September 1992–