Rybchinsky is a notable figure on the US architectural scene: he actively writes critical articles in the press, and the count of his books has already gone to dozens. Now that How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit, published last fall, has received numerous accolades, explaining the principles of modern architects to a wide readership, his "introduction to modern urban planning" is presented to the Russian-speaking public. - published in the author's homeland in 2010 Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities.
It should be noted right away that the book (you can read an excerpt of it here) is intended for the American reader and therefore is very, very USA-centric. Even the "Bilbao effect" is explained by the example of a competition for a project to rebuild the World Trade Center after the September 11 terrorist attack in New York, and the Guggenheim Museum in Spain, which did not give its name at all (it is mentioned only later, and rather briefly). Of course, this cannot but annoy at times, but, on the other hand, in the history of the American city in the XX century - and this is what the book is mainly devoted to - there is a lot of instructive for the domestic reader as well. Perhaps reflections on it are even more interesting and fruitful than the already boring comparisons with Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Berlin. For example, the episode described there about the complete collapse of the idea of pedestrian zones makes us think about the prospects of the currently created Moscow pedestrian streets: starting from 1957, such spaces with benches were created relatively quickly in more than 200 US cities, but they turned out to be popular only among the homeless, and ordinary citizens, and, as a result, cafes and shops did not favor them. Therefore, today there are only 30 of them left throughout the country, and mainly in university and tourist centers, where there are many people with an excess of free time, ready to fly there or sit in a cafe.
It is also worth understanding that the "City Designer" is designed for a wide reader and therefore the author in some places greatly simplifies the situation, but for the domestic professional audience it may be interesting not only as a completely detailed source of information about the development of American cities, but also as an example of an unusual view of good familiar things: the mere interpretation of Le Corbusier as an extremely arrogant self-taught urban planner, who did not bring anything essentially new to the United States, but still managed to negatively affect local principles of urban planning, is very, very entertaining - also because his theses Rybchinsky carefully substantiates.
The original title of the book is translated into Russian as "self-made metropolis": the author emphasizes that the city is a layering of different concepts and "intentions", and large-scale, as in the era of post-war planning in the spirit of modernism, and very small - as innovative development projects of the beginning or end XX century. The main milestones are analyzed in detail - from the completely American movement City Beautiful ("For a beautiful city") at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries, the ideas of which, however, are also suitable for today's Russia, to the "garden city" of Ebinezer Howard, whom Rybchinsky considers as grown exclusively on American soil, from Le Corbusier and the cities of the middle of the last century that fell under his influence "reenactors" to Jane Jacobs, whose ideas he does not unconditionally accept. As we get closer to the present day, the relevance of the book is growing: after all, in the end, the ideas won in the United States not by modernists or Jacobs, but by F. L. Wright about the "scattered" city. As he expected, using new modes of transport and communication, the Americans chose to move to the suburbs, and, as the author convincingly shows on the basis of statistics, the return to the city, which has been much and often talked about in recent decades, has not really been returned. happened.
However, since the last third of the 20th century, when business planners replaced city planners as city designers, the structure of cities is more determined by demand, that is, by the desires of the residents themselves, than by third-party ideas about which houses or neighborhoods will be more convenient for the population. This has resulted in a much greater variety of types and typologies - from residential suburbs of a new type, where large companies prefer to be located, to the reconstruction of harbors, from unexpectedly popular multi-storey residential complexes to a partial shift of the center of gravity from megacities towards small towns. Not much attention has been paid to "sustainable development", but it even pleasantly diversifies the overall picture of this topic being exaggerated - often without much meaning or new ideas.
With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we are publishing an excerpt from the chapter "Home remedies" from Witold Rybczynski's book "City Designer. Ideas and Cities”(Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014), dedicated to Jane Jacobs and the assessment of her ideas in the 1960s and now.
