Witold Rybczynski is no great fan of urban planning. In a recent column in Slate, he offered a note of caution about city "smart plans" championed by the director of President Barack Obama's new White House Office of Urban Affairs. "The last binge of planning in the 1960s produced urban renewal, city expressways, and acres of housing projects from which many cities are still only partially recovered," he wrote. He concluded by paraphrasing the great urban planner Daniel Burnham: "Make no big plans, only small ones."

Rybczynski is an architect, author of more than a dozen books, and, during the day, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. In a forthcoming book, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities, he explores the forces—and the people—that have shaped the contemporary urban landscape, including writer and historian Lewis Mumford, who championed smallscale urban planning as a way to balance people's lives with their surroundings, and Jane Jacobs, who rejected planning and reveled instead in the yeasty, chaotic energy that animated places like Greenwich Village. (Jacobs's 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is required reading for every student of contemporary urbanity.) Then Rybczynski describes the imperative for a new breed of ecologically friendly city, built to meet the challenge of sustainability in an age of global environmental crisis.

So how, you might wonder, do we get there without big plans?

His answer to this question, he says, has been shaped by his time teaching in the real estate department of the Wharton business school. Where planners and architects traditionally work to design spaces that function the way they ought to—walkable neighborhoods with green spaces, bike paths, and public transportation—the budding MBAs in the real estate program are more interested in what people want from a place. Ultimately, the business students believe that it is the market that decides what works and what doesn't—a philosophy that Rybczynski says has proven sound. "Real estate entrepreneurs … long ago replaced planners as the chief urban strategists," he writes in the preface to Makeshift Metropolis.

Still, Rybczynski recognizes the need for a larger vision—if not big plans, then at least many small ones. "The kind of cities that Americans want, and the kind of cities that the present environmental crisis suggests that we need … turn out to be not at all the same," he writes. "Resolving this contradiction is the prime challenge for the next generation of city builders."



Q In your latest book, Makeshift Metropolis, you write a lot about Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, two of the great thinkers about the urban world.
A The interesting thing about cities is that it's not a science; it's not something you can study. Jane Jacobs was selftaught. She was a journalist. Mumford was also not an academic. He was really an essayist and a journalist. Often the most interesting writing about our cities has come from these unexpected directions. Despite what city planners sometimes say, it isn't really a science where people have black and white answers for everything. And often when we do have black and white answers is when we get into trouble, which is what happened in the '60s, where we thought we knew how to re-plan cities with urban expressways and public housing projects and superblock projects, and really created a great deal of problems. Many cities are still recovering from that "urban renewal" period.


Q This city suffered mightily from urban renewal and development and city housing projects and gigantic highways that divided the city and ended up going nowhere.

A We [in the United States] are not like France and England that have one major city. We have many important cities. These cities compete with each other. When an idea comes along, like urban expressways, it spreads because cities don't want to feel that they're falling behind. So things like pedestrian malls—which were a terrible idea—there were hundreds of them across the country.

Boston was one of the five biggest cities in the country a hundred years ago, and today I think it's number twentyfive. Then there are cities like Detroit that have lost population and are economically worse off than they were in the 1920s. It's a kind of a ruthless system where you can get bumped off the train very easily.


Q In the last fifty years, the middle class has fled to create the suburbs. Cities have become mired in poverty. This whole young urban movement is growing, but it is really a small percentage of the people in those cities.

A Remember all those novels written when cities were growing, by people like [Charles] Dickens? The city was the place that attracted ambition. The other people stayed in the village and stayed farming, and their lives changed slowly, but the really ambitious people made it to the city. Today, if the city no longer attracts those people, that changes the city, too. New York still has the ability to attract ambition. People [go there] from all over the world, and that keeps the city going. It's as if you were priming the pump of the city continually. That's very important for a city if it's to be vital and active.


Q How do you think that 21stcentury cities can creatively, intelligently accommodate middle-class families and younger thinkers?

A A big question is whether Americans will change their minds about living in cities. If we're very young, we're attracted to cities, and we're also attracted when we retire; our kids grow up, and we get tired of living in the suburbs, and the city becomes an attractive place again. What we haven't succeeded in doing is convincing ourselves that cities are a place where you could raise a family. That's a big cultural question. Part of the answer is going to be the green movement. Part of the answer will be very high gas prices. For a certain number of people, commuting, spending all this money on a large freestanding house suddenly becomes a lot less attractive, and the city becomes a more attractive place.


Q Are there places that you study that are retooling urban neighborhoods in a way that make them safe and thriving places for families?

A There are about half a dozen American downtowns that have attracted significant populations, which can then support amenities and stores and things like that. That is more than we had thirty years ago. Remember, there is no tradition of living downtown in American cities. Traditionally American downtowns were commercial. That has changed, but it's a very small change.

Montreal has tried to recreate the neighborhood by decentralizing its government somewhat and having neighborhoodlevel governments. [They] try to recreate that pre-industrial sense that you had a neighborhood, you controlled things—there was a parish and a school, and you related to that, not to the whole city. That's one option—breaking it down, creating some kind of neighborhood-level jurisdiction. It's sort of like making small towns within the big city.


Q You wrote a book about Frederick Law Olmsted. In your new book, you write about Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. Supposing that here in the 21st century you had them all in a room. Tell me what you think they would think about where we are now.

A What's strange is that they are all very influential, and their ideas have borne fruit, but in some ways not in the way they expected. With Jane Jacobs, her influence is enormous. You can't underestimate her influence on planners or anyone who manages cities or deals with cities. The same way that Julia Child taught Americans how to eat, [Jacobs] taught Americans how to live in cities. She's continually fascinated by this idea that you have this very large number of people, and that it's the decisions of many individuals in the city that finally make the city. It isn't about grand plans; it's about all these individuals doing things. It's what makes cities attractive. They're not predictable. You can find all sorts of niches in cities. It hasn't been planned except in a very rough way.

What's happened is that [her ideas have] almost become too successful. The problem is that there aren't enough Greenwich Villages to go around. The places she loved and studied and wrote about have become very exclusive. Greenwich Village, or Society Hill in Philadelphia—these attractive old neighborhoods have become very expensive. Most people wouldn't even think of living there. They couldn't afford it. I think that would have surprised her. Although she was so smart that maybe she foresaw that too.

The one that would be the most positive is probably Olmsted. In the last decade or two, we've started building urban parks again. They're not quite as big as his were. But the public spaces in the city kind of disappeared. From 1900 to 1980, parks were not something that cities created; it was considered oldfashioned. Now I think every city has one or even several new, big, urban parks being built or being planned. The idea has come to life again.


Q Do you think that urban planning is a waste of time?

A No. I think cities are fascinating … I'm very strong on development. I think that the private market is what has created American cities from the beginning. [Urban development is] driven by entrepreneurs and risktakers. But the public government has a role to play. It can make these projects very difficult or expensive, or it can encourage them. The downside of the private market is that the developer is only thinking about his own project. Somebody does have to put the pieces together or link them up when they need to be linked. That is the city itself. Cities are not very good at developing, but they do have that responsibility, and they do have the tools to deal with transportation and infrastructural issues. Only the city can do that.



  On the air: Listen to a podcast of the full interview with Witold Rybczynski at www.steinershow.org or tune in to The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on June 17.