Event

Penn Institute for Urban Research hosts the acclaimed architectural thinker at the Philadelphia Center for Architecture. With his new book, Makeshift Metropolis Witold Rybczynski is back to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live. With erudite but quick-paced prose, 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.Makeshift Metropolis is an authoritative and immensely engaging history of American urban planning and a look to its future. It affirms Rybczynski’s role as one of our most original thinkers on the way we live today.

 The talk will be followed by a book signing and reception. Books will also be available to purchase.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register by emailing penniur@pobox.upenn.edu