City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World.

Although his books are shelved in the architecture section, Witold Rybczynski is really an uncommonly curious and nimble cultural critic. His latest book, as one might expect from its title, is first of all a book about cities. In it he proposes that from the first colonial settlements to the port cities of the Federal period, from frontier towns to today's vast metropolitan areas and malls, Americans' expectations for the places where they live have always been urban, and that this trait has helped to distinguish American cities from European ones. Such an argument requires a broad definition of "urban," one that includes New York, Toronto, the upstate New York town of Plattsburgh, and places far smaller. But Rybczynski isn't making an argument so much as making an excursion - or creating a kind of setting for an excursion. It becomes clear that City Life is really a book about how we live, how we choose how we live, and how we might make those choices more wisely.

Like many of the best cultural critics, Rybczynski doesn't state his case so much as give form to the virtues he espouses. Thus his book has the qualities that he most admires in urban life. It is orderly but not too planned - he is free to roam for his own pleasure and the reader's. Past and present are always jostling against each other, with Tocqueville up the street a ways from Andy Warhol. Rybczynski's personality is informed by the places he writes about as ours are informed by the places where we live, which, he observes, are always "facilitating and shaping our wanderings."

Rybczynski begins by telling about a friend who, upon returning from Paris, asked him why North American cities aren't like those in Europe. "Where were the elegant avenues, the great civic spaces, and the impressive public monuments?" While City Life answers her question, it is structured as a chronological account of the development of American cities against the background of Europe - the native land of the men who founded the first American cities, the training ground of the great planners and architects of a century ago, and a constant touchstone for the civic aspirations of Americans, who have transformed European urban themes even as we have emulated them.

After a taxonomic survey of different types of city plans (the cosmic, the practical, the organic) and different kinds of towns (open, closed, subjugated), Rybczynski discusses the plans of early American cities, whose defining traits were set in place when they were planned, not when they were founded. As often as not, of course, these cities didn't develop the way the planners expected. William Penn planned Philadelphia as a rectangular grid of large plots, only for them to be subdivided by thrifty Quakers. Williamsburg was planned exquisitely but was hindered by its lack of a port. Washington was planned as a port, but Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate the buildup of silt in the Potomac, so Baltimore emerged as the mid-Atlantic port city.

Here, as throughout the book, Rybczynski aims to surprise the reader with facts that run counter to expectations. We learn that Renaissance Venice had a population the size of Little Rock's, that San Jose is now larger than San Francisco and Zurich smaller than Buffalo, that the architecture of New Orleans's French Quarter emulates Spanish and not French models. "Seventeenth-century grid planning," he informs us, "did incorporate a new type of urban space for which there was no contemporary European precedent: the broad, tree-lined residential street. This emphasis on trees was distinctive, and was epitomized by the characteristic American habit (popularized, if not invented, by William Penn) of naming streets after trees."

The tone of that passage is characteristic: learned, lightly inflected, quicker to describe than to judge, shining bright with Rybczynski's curiosity about cities and their histories. When he does strike an evaluative note, he is a gentle contrarian, as when he suggests that the grid pattern of American cities, often associated with dull regularity, "was initially adopted for easy and rapid real estate development, but it also turned out to be an ideal accommodating device for a more tolerant society."

As Rybczynski's narrative draws near the twentieth century, the prescriptive note in his prose grows more pronounced. After an inevitable chapter about Tocqueville's thoughts on American cities (he couldn't get used to numbered streets, another American invention), Rybczynski turns to Chicago, and to the planners who are the heroes of the book: Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, and Daniel Burnham and his sons. The Great Fire that destroyed much of Chicago in 1871 gave a generation of planners the opportunity to refashion the city in accord with its growth in population and civic ambitions, and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 allowed Olmsted, McKim, and Burnham to build, at public expense, a "White City" (most of the buildings were fashioned from unusually brilliant white stone, as though to banish the soot and ash left by the Great Fire) that borrowed from Europe yet was American in character. Stating his own ideal, Rybczynski writes: "Chicago's Columbian Exposition provided a real and well-publicized demonstration of how the unruly American downtown could be tamed through a partnership of classical architecture, urban landscaping, and heroic public art."

It is a long way from the White City to present-day Chicago, and in Rybczynski's view American cities would do well to make the pilgrimage back, somehow. He is an admirer of the skyscraper, but he is dismayed by the way the skyscraper, whose heights greatly increased the value of downtown real estate, put an end in many downtowns to the mixed-use approach, in which residential, commercial, and civic structures nestle cheek by jowl. More pointedly, he laments the way the cult of the skyscraper diverted the attention of modernist architects toward the great symbolic statement and away from domestic architecture and the design of the neighborhood as a whole.

Indeed, in Rybczynski's account American modernism is the story of how architects lost sight of the way people actually live. In the cities, the disciples of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier (whom he sees as a Warhol-like artist of the public gesture) tried to adapt the models of the skyscraper and the luxury apartment tower for low-income housing, with notoriously bad results, as seen in Chicago's Cabrini-Green project: "The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairmen, baby sitters, and gardeners; the poor have no hired help. Without restricted access, the lobbies and elevators are vandalized; without proper maintenance, broken elevators do not get fixed, staircases become garbage dumps, and broken windows remain unreplaced; without baby sitters, single mothers are stranded in their apartments, and adolescents roam, unsupervised, sixteen floors below...."

In the suburbs, meanwhile, town planners ignored the precedents of such planned communities as Riverside, Illinois, and Garden City, on Long Island, and developers built sprawling "developments" - there is really no other word for them - of undifferentiated single-family units in order to meet the huge demand for home ownership among returning soldiers after World War II. As a result - or a related development - the shopping mall became the de facto civic center of most suburbs, causing the cities and towns they had been built around to decay.

Surprisingly, Rybczynski likes malls, and finds in them the "urban" qualities that have characterized American town life down the years: walking, face-to-face encounters with neighbors and strangers, a blend of small stores and large ones, retail and restaurants, purposeful shopping and creative loafing. In fact, he sees malls fulfilling the civic expectations that cities themselves have given up on. "I think that what attracts people to malls is that they are perceived as public spaces where rules of personal conduct are enforced. In other words, they are more like public streets used to be before police indifference and overzealous protectors of individual rights effectively ensured that any behavior, no matter how antisocial, is tolerated."

I suspect that there are many reasons for Rybczynski's temperate advocacy of malls beyond his natural affection for them, which he discovered when he and his wife found themselves driving from their home in rural Quebec to a mall outside Plattsburgh "just to stroll." His position is derived from his broad definition of "urban" virtues, and from his fondness for surprising his readers: he is determined, I think, to champion the virtues of the urban past without becoming a throwback or a curmudgeon. And I think this may be due to his sense that open-mindedness and tolerance for the mall-going ways of others are characteristically urban virtues, which he tries to practice in his work as he does on the streets of Philadelphia, where he now lives. He is keen-eyed, commonsensical, able to reason and to judge, but his manner is that of a person who is (this is the title of one of his previous books) just "looking around."

Unfortunately, in making his gently contrarian argument in favor of malls Rybczynski seems not to see the crucial way they stand outside of the mixed-use approach he favors. No matter how many stores they have, most malls have a few offices at most, and no government buildings. And, of course, no one lives there. Malls will never be urban as long as everybody must drive home.

In a similar way, Rybczynski's genial and upbeat approach to cultural criticism leaves his generally expert, original, and delicious book lacking one other virtue that can be called urban: that of genuine conflict or reckoning with the arguments of others. For all his advocacy of the city as a place of heterogeneity and face-to-face encounters, he seems to be all by himself in the urbane project of his book. This is due partly to rhetorical selection on his part: he generalizes about overly theoretical architects and takes a swipe or two at the safely dead high modernists, but never fully engages the arguments of current urban thinkers whose views might differ from his.

This lack of argument can also be traced to the nature of Rybczynski's topic, the physical city. While he knows the writings of the great architects and planners, his main exhibits are the structures themselves, which are silent. It is enough to make the writer who is drawn to other subjects - politics, say, or religion - finish this book at once faintly disappointed with Rybczynski and in envy of him, the master of a subject whose protagonists are richly expressive but cannot talk back.