THE LIVING CITY

A vivid look at a key controversy in city planning, written for a popular audience.

To Fitzgerald, a professor of medical humanities and social sciences, urban planners fixated on the idea that more green spaces makes a better city believed “there was something about our cities that was simply bad for us.” Granted, the cities into which humans began flocking after 1800 were crammed, filthy, and wildly unhealthy for anyone except the wealthy. As the century progressed, reforms and technology relieved the worst features, but even today, it remains an accepted belief that crowded cities are sinks of stress and mental illness. By the mid-19th century, planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted had the solution: bring the natural world back into to the city, “so that it was not really a city at all,” but rather a massive landscaped park with hundreds of buildings. This “garden city” remains a powerful influence, perhaps epitomized by Le Corbusier’s iconic designs, which place citizens in scattered skyscrapers among vast tracts of open land for rest and play, connected by multilane freeways to distant offices and factories. Although Fitzgerald agrees that greenery improves a city’s quality of life, he doubts that it exerts “a quasi-religious, even transcendental effect on nearby humans” and worries that “we have given too much weight to people who don’t actually like cities very much.” That “our buildings should align with complex, natural, evolutionary processes” remains a city planning mantra, and this skeptical overview gives its opponents up-to-date ammunition, although they will likely remain a minority. The classic love letter to the messy, unreformed metropolis remains Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but open-minded readers will relish many of Fitzgerald’s interesting arguments in favor of traditional city structure.

A lively, opinionated, eminently debatable contribution to a surprisingly bitter debate.