As urban populations worldwide increase, cities are attracting ever more interest as subjects of study. Today, 83% of the U.S. population is urban—a figure that is expected to rise to 89% by 2050. (68% of the world’s population is predicted to live in cities by 2050.) Many fundamental aspects of cities—their function, shape, and purpose—are being increasingly interrogated. How cities influence human health during pandemics, contribute to climate change, and support technological innovation are but a few of the questions architects, urban planners, and policy-makers aim to answer.
One curious individual is architect Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder and creative director of the New York firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU). In his new book, The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy (Princeton University Press, 2024), Chakrabarti grapples with cities’ most significant opportunities and challenges in the ensuing decades on a warming planet. Chakrabarti characterizes the optimal path forward in design terms, calling for an “architecture of urbanity” as the solution for a socially and environmentally just future.
The book is organized into two primary sections: a series of chapters labeled “Despair” about urban challenges and a series labeled “Hope” about potential answers. Because The Architecture of Urbanity is written for a broad audience, architects and urban designers will already be familiar with much of its content (e.g., Ebenezer Howard, Jane Jacobs, or Critical Regionalism). Nevertheless, Chakrabarti offers new insights about urban design’s most significant obstacles and opportunities—and dispels a few commonly held myths.
Cities offer a mirror to human societies, reflecting both their resilience and fragility. 21st-century cataclysmic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and COVID-19 bring such qualities into sharp focus. For Chakrabarti, the central character of cities is architecture—that which gives cities their physicality. It is, therefore, unfortunate that architecture is often taken for granted “as much as the air we breathe or the sidewalks we traverse.”
“Cities have always been my fascination because they spatially mediate between people and the planet,” writes Chakrabarti. He offers the concept of “connective design,” a broad strategy to develop deeper physical connections at all scales, “whether it be the placement of a door, the creation of an arcade, the planning of public space, the placed-based evolution of a skyline, or the deployment of materials or tectonics that reflect local narratives, all in the service of creating connections across the fractious human condition we must together overcome.” Unlike the Postmodern school of thought, which diminished architecture’s role in addressing societal problems, Chakrabarti promotes an ambitious agenda for architecture that is reminiscent of early 20th-century beliefs in its expansive agency.
While Chakrabarti is optimistic, he is also disheartened. In the Despair section, the author devotes nearly 100 pages to problems. The automobile earns the top rank. Chakrabarti reminds us that streets predate cars. “For thousands of years humans have used street grids to organize cities and connect communities for reasons as spiritual and societal as they were economic and functional,” he writes. Today, many roadways that accommodate multiple lanes of automotive traffic are no longer streets, as they do not facilitate public interaction as premodern versions did. What is worse, car commuting kills. “A global death toll close to 70% of 2020 COVID-19 deaths has resulted every year from roadway fatalities for the past two decades,” Chakrabarti declares, offering a series of potent graphs of auto-related deaths and respiratory hazard maps. Furthermore, approximately one-third of urban area is devoted to road paving. Not only could this surface be used for many valuable purposes, but it also contributes significantly to the urban heat island effect.
Other challenges include the city's increasing homogenization due to formulaic, developer-driven economics, inadequate disaster preparedness (such as building in floodplains), and entrenched social inequities. In the chapter “For Whom the Dole Tolls,” the author reveals that the Pruitt-Igoe housing project’s failure was not due to the architecture. The ill-fated development ultimately met its demise due to property mismanagement rather than an inappropriate design solution, as has long been believed.
The following “Hope” section offers relief in various forms. Riffing on Gertrude Stein’s phrase “there is no there there” in reference to the placeless suburbs, Chakrabarti provides “there is a here here” case studies of memorable places that exhibit exemplary features. Examples include urban infrastructure like Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels Escalator System, urban housing like Hillside Terrace in Tokyo, and Grand Boulevards like the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.
Other chapters argue for a more inclusive, accessible, and empowering model of architectural practice. The Architecture of Urbanity concludes with an intriguing argument for “Goldilocks” density. “From the brownstones of Boston to the hutongs of Beijing, some of our most revered urban housing has been built at a scale of about three stories,” he writes. Although there is no absolute or scientifically exact height limit, the three stories are considered close to being ideal from an operational and embodied carbon standpoint. Three-story urban fabric gains efficiency from its collective units while avoiding the outsized carbon costs of tall buildings (both the single detached house and the skyscraper are more resource-intensive).
For all the book’s strengths, I offer two critiques. The first addresses the lack of a clear and substantive response in an implied call-and-response structure. The book’s two sections, Despair and Hope, each have five chapters and a similar page count. The Despair section offers a sobering and well-argued analysis of cities’ significant challenges in both text and illustrative form. However, a reader presuming that Hope will outline the solutions to these problems, organized similarly, will be disappointed. Instead, the Hope section consists of a different collection of topics, including more challenges and content that distracts from the core message, like the “Rebel Rebel” portion that consists primarily of rough sketches.
The second critique is the author’s decision to include a chapter on his firm’s work following chapters in which he discusses superlative international projects and Pritzker prize-winning architects. This self-promotional insertion is awkward, and while the work has merit, the book would have benefited by either eliminating this chapter or using PAU’s work as the common thread that holds the book together, similar to a conceptual monograph.
Nevertheless, the arguments and topics addressed in The Architecture of Urbanity are highly relevant and valuable for the AEC industry as well as the general public. It is refreshing to have a voice like Chakrabarti’s championing architecture as a force for positive change, and to a broad audience. Let us hope people listen.
