Building Cities That Work

Since 1945, North Americans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on urban development, literally transforming the landscape of the continent. This development is disastrous, Edmund Fowler maintains, because it is inordinately expensive, destructive of the environment, and disruptive of healthy social life and authentic politics. Revealing the connections between our basic cultural beliefs and why we build the way we do, Fowler stresses that to build cities that work, we must become aware of how our personal choices contribute to the form of the built environment. Using Jane Jacobs' critique of post-war city-building as a starting point, Fowler shows that recent North American urban development has been characterized by development projects on a massive scale, an indiscriminate use of vast areas of land, and an increasingly evident homogeneity. These are characteristics, Fowler argues, of a perverse and unnatural way of building that is wrecking the planet and enfeebling our social and political networks. In exploring how the built environment contributes to social problems, Fowler used Toronto as a case study, conducting extensive field work in 19 areas of the city. He shows not only that post-war building was the result of conscious public policy but goes further, arguing that our cities reflect deep-seated insecurities and cultural malaise in surprisingly direct ways.