Witold Rybczynski's Makeshift Metropolis

I have to say, I am really loving the fact that I'm just a ten minute drive from the National Building Museum.  Last week, the museum had Robert Gatje give a great lecture on Great Public Squares.  (Gatje actually emailed me after getting a google hit on my post.  He wrote that he was glad to know people appreciate hearing the names of the books he cites!)  Last night, they hosted a wonderful talk by Witold Rybczynski about the evolution of western thought on city planning over the past 150 or so years. 

Rybczynski may be familiar to landscape architects as he wrote the award-winning
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century.  He also wrote Home: A Short History of an Idea, which is a casual study of how we make our spaces our own, our homes.

I'm pretty sure that the ghost of Jane Jacobs was in the hall; insights in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities are still relevant.  However, Rybczynski appropriately notes that today, Jacobs' Greenwich Village neighborhood is no longer the social melting pot it once was.  Since only the wealthy can inhabit the homes in neighborhoods like the Village and, here in DC, Georgetown, they consequently seem to have reached some level of social stagnancy.

The lecture was wonderful; to me, the best part about his talk was that Rybczynski didn't offer any overreaching visions or theses.  He actively avoided 'Redefining The New City Of Tomorrow' or anything of that ilk.  Instead, he urges planners to conservatively implement smaller innovations for cities, while protecting the facets of urban life that have proven desirable and effective for hundreds of years.  He lists those facets as (in no particular order): water, streets, conservation, mixed use, infill, shopping and parks.