Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities - Paperback

$19.57
$19.57
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Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities
  • Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities
Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities - Paperback

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities - Paperback

by Witold Rybczynski
$19.57
$19.57

Book Overview

by Witold Rybczynski (Author)

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.
Number of Pages: 256
Dimensions: 0.8 x 8.9 x 5.9 IN
Illustrated: Yes
Publication Date: September 02, 2011
ISBN9781416561262
Author Witold Rybczynski
PublisherScribner Book Company
GenreNews & politics, Education, Design, and Society & culture
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2011
LanguageENG- English
Pages256
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Architecture Nonfiction Political Science Social Science

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About Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of many books, including the award-winning biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, and the best-selling Home: A Short History of an Idea. He has written on architecture and urbanism for the New York Times, New Yorker, Slate, and New York Review of Books. Laurie Olin is Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Principal of the Olin Partnership, a landscape architecture firm in Philadelphia. He is the author of Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes and a coauthor of La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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