I’ve just finished reading Witold Rybczynski’s 2010 book, Makeshift Metropolis. Rybczynski is a professor of Urbanism at The University of Pennsylvania, and has written a number of books, mostly on architecture and housing. Here, he clearly provides an organized picture of the planning and development evolution in American metropolitan regions starting with the onset of the 20th Century. Rybczynski recounts and contextualizes the successive impacts of the City Beautiful, Garden City and Radiant City movements, as well as the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Frank Lloyd Wright, before moving on to discuss today’s age of the market, in which planners and developers work with entrepreneurs to reshape our cities. This collection of the Rybczynski’s observations and critiques is concise and light, but was well worth the read. I had fun with this one.
