City Life

by Witold Rybczynski

Notes:

Ch. 1 Why Aren’t Our Cities Like That?
-leaders as architects: FDR (amateur) and Jefferson vs. Louis XIV
-from the French: avenues = important diagonal streets; boulevards = broad promenades
-“With very few exceptions… we have made street corners, not plazas, into symbolic civic places.” (27) Hollywood/Vine or Times Square vs. Red Square or Piazza San Marco
-John Lukacs on American restlessness: we have street corners b/c we are mobile; we are mobile because we have a vast continent to move on in (34)

Ch 2. The Measure of a Town
-word roots: German (burg), French (bourg, ville), Latin (urbs, rus), Old English (t?n), Old French (cité), Spanish (ciudad), Italian (cittá)
-American city planner Kevin Lynch’s three conceptual models for cities: cosmic, practical, organic
-French historian Fernand Braudel’s three stages in early history of English gowns: open, closed, subjugated

Ch 3. A New, Uncrowded World
-Hispanic vs. French vs. English colonial urbanization
-The Laws of the Indies
-Native American settlements

Ch. 4 A Frenchman in New York
-Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave-Auguste de Beaumont
-de Tocqueville on democracy leaving art at the mercy of the masses (101)
-New York as commercial capital, Boston as cultural capitol, and Washington as seat of govt. “This diffusion of powers was not accidental.” (104)

Ch. 5 In the Land of the Dollar
-the word “downtown” is of American origin

Ch. 6 Civic Art
-the skyscraper — symbol of commercialism in America (144)

Ch. 7 High Hopes
-1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition
-Le Corbusier
-highway construction as Pyrrhic victory — “There was a temporary creation of construction jobs, to be sure, but the highways (usually elevated) wrought physical havoc on the established urban fabric…” (161)
-Cabrini-Green, Chicago

Ch. 8 Country Homes for City People
-city vs. suburb

Ch. 9 The New Downtown
-the rise of malls
-private property/public space
-supermarkets (due to cars)

Ch. 10 The Best of Both Worlds

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