If being quotable and being civically influential were the same thing, Mark Twain and Bob Dylan would have been presidents. In his new book, The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy (Princeton Architectural Press), Vishaan Chakrabarti, the founder of New York’s Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), dares to invoke concepts such as humanism, joy, and urban-rural harmony on “this warm, sweet earth” at a moment when the opponents of all those concepts are resurgent. Some readers will accuse him of whistling in the dark; others will find his diagnoses dead-accurate, his recommendations precisely what this dark moment requires. 

The architect/planner/author/academic is something of a flak magnet. His work generates intriguing tensions between, along one axis, his public eloquence and his record of built projects (which continues to evolve), and, along another, his feisty outsider critiques and the need to connect with readers and citizens in the very places he’s critiquing. The new book resembles its predecessor, A Country of Cities (Metropolis Books, 2013), in advocating dense, diverse, energy-efficient, transit-centered development that ends the 20th century’s unhealthy fealty to car-dependent suburbanism. It extends the first book’s argument beyond the city limits, aiming for a sense of “rurbanity” that a culture war–weary nation sorely needs. Using the term palimpsest as a model for design that respects, while rethinking, what has gone before, he writes that way as well, refining his previous positions in hope of shifting the Overton window of urbanist debate.

Chakrabarti’s fingerprints are on several projects that define today’s New York (for better and worse). He has drawn criticism for his work directing the Department of City Planning’s Manhattan office during the developer-friendly Bloomberg mayoralty. He was a senior executive at Related during its work on Hudson Yards—that grand blown opportunity, a public-private partnership (P3) where public investment yielded few public benefits but a private windfall and a mall-centered dystopia, as detached from street life as any gated community (though he noted to me, in a fact-checking message, that “while I was at Related, I ran the Moynihan Station project. I had virtually no involvement with Hudson Yards at Related”). The book ignores that project, which largely exemplifies the generic pseudo-urbanism he now decries. Perhaps his experience there is one reason his tone toward cookie-cutter densification—“large, lucrative, lobotomized towers”—is so acerbic; at any rate, the gap between his progressive discourse and his commercial projects has tainted his public image in some quarters. His task is to advance a credible ethos as a corrector of errors (his own included) while controlling collateral damage from his critical exuberance. 

“If the twentieth century was about reinventing the world from scratch,” he contends, “the twenty-first is about reimagining our relationship with the existing world.” He challenges the architectural profession to redefine its standards to value “connective design” over well-intentioned banality, “a technocratically performative yet culturally repellent world.” Recognizing responses charging A Country of Cities with promoting “mundane and monolithic” forms of density, he offers a mid-mission course correction.

The unaltered mission is a respect for urbanity, which he defines in ways that might reduce the urban-rural tensions that make American cultural politics so tiresomely tribal. “If we are to avoid the civil unrest associated with our fractious global politics,” he says in the introductory chapter, “we cannot focus on the urban to the exclusion of the rural.” Chakrabartian urbanity is qualitatively urbane, not quantitatively urban and confined to the metropolis; it refers to “a community inhabited by people from many different cultures and classes who spatially interact.” It appears in smaller places just as easily as larger ones: modernist mini-mecca Columbus, Indiana; Patchogue, Long Island; and the fictional town of Schitt’s Creek. 

He steers clear, however, of the reflexive conflation of rusticity with virtue. He observes that “if demography is with urbanity and BLM, the geography of exurbia is firmly in the vice grip [sic] of MAGA, an exurbia that essentially says, ‛ask not for whom the dole tolls, it tolls for me.’” After A Country of Cities lamented the vast federal subsidies directed to entitled, automobilized suburbanites, Chakrabarti reports receiving “many a colorful and threatening missive” from culture warriors for whom “the GOP’s age-old fury around ‛Guns, God, and Gays’ now includes Gas Guzzlers.” 

Between such pitchfork-wielding responses from below and encounters with prejudice from above (“In March 2005 … I was told point-blank by a partner of a much-heralded legacy architecture firm”—the date makes it easy to guess which one—“that I would never be promoted to partnership because I am not white”), Chakrabarti’s cognizance of racism and other forms of disconnectedness is ever-present. He does not suggest that architecture alone can eradicate these ills; still, he contends, without rethinking its complicity in “profligate starchitecture and retrograde historicism [along with] the twentieth-century, tabula-rasa urban renewal impulses that led society to tear down too much and preserve too little,” architecture can neither change an environment stifling reconnection nor attain “the economic or societal value it claims to desire.” 

After the introduction, the book comprises two major sections, five chapters each (some discursive, some visual palate cleansers), under the rubrics “Despair” and “Hope.” Places that foster segregation by “skin color, bank balances, and—perhaps most importantly—mindsets” generate a despair that he articulates ferociously, focusing on wasteful, filthy, deadly auto-centered spatial design in a 23-page, all-infographic chapter titled “Rage Against the Machine” (one of many details providing a rock/pop soundtrack). Most of these arguments will not be novel to readers of Charles Komanoff and others in Streetsblog, Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation, Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic, the Victoria Transport Policy Institute’s research, or other assaults on the ideology I have elsewhere labeled labeled “Motorism,” yet “Rage” renders the case succinctly enough that one might hope these 23 pages and their supporting data would become mandatory reading for anyone seeking a driver’s license. 

Case studies are selected on a global scale, with one chapter on PAU’s own work. These sections locate grounds for respect in sites ranging from European squares and boulevards to public spaces formed by communities in Al Fawwar, West Bank, and Nakivale, Uganda, or designed by “socially minded” architects, including recent harvesters of progressive Pritzkers: Alejandro Aravena, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Balkrishna Doshi, and Diébédo Francis Kéré. 

A constant theme is the resistance of locales to the blank-slate impulses of modernism in the forms it took after its co-optation by neoliberal economics. Chakrabarti cites landscape architect Walter Hood’s critique of the colonialism and privilege inherent in placemaking as term and practice, approving instead the placekeeping practiced in Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism and related “meta-modern, rearguard” philosophies. 

Chakrabarti’s rhetoric accounts for much of his appeal while raising questions about how different audiences will respond to it. He is fond of punchy wordplay and not averse to lobbing the occasional hand grenade. Surprise juxtapositions, arresting images, revised song lyrics, and détournements of clichés proliferate. He rarely hesitates to offend the defenders of culpable institutions or practices. Discussing the global economic consequences of American support for “free highways, unjustifiable [mortgage] tax deductions, artificially uplifted public-school systems, and barely taxed gasoline,” he writes, “we remain reluctant to acknowledge how vulnerable our fossil-fueled economy makes us to petro-dictators. Arguably, it is not the expansion of NATO that has enabled Putin’s criminality; it is the subsidized expansion of our houses and cars.” (Chakrabarti’s zingers are not limited to his books; at a recent WNYC interview, he described flashy utopias for dodgy clients as “spaceships in the sand built by slaves” and recalled witnessing, on a recent cross-country drive, how “Middle America went from Main Street to malls to meth.”)

For those of us who agree that suburbia deserves swift reductions in its massive subsidies, that neoliberal economics is fundamentally fraudulent, and that the private automobile has proven to be no friend to the Earth and a false friend to most people’s quality of life, these detonations are delightful. (One thinks of a line attributed to Mae West: “Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”) There is a nontrivial risk, however, when an author replaces preaching to the converted with punching the unconverted. Strong performative language has a way of sharpening the very polarization Chakrabarti finds deplorable.

Among his cultural enthusiasms, the songs of Talking Heads loom large. Chakrabarti recurrently quotes a line from “This Must Be the Place” (“I’m just an animal looking for a home”), clearly a personal touchstone, an expression of a connective impulse: we’re all social animals seeking shelter and companionship, whatever shelters we build. He draws on David Byrne’s work again (“Don’t Worry About the Government”) in defending public-sector workers against the Reaganite/Thatcherist myth of governmental ineptitude: “Some civil servants are just like my loved ones / They work so hard, and they try to be strong.” Yet this is the same Byrne who wrote one of the most dismissive lines ever uttered by a New Yorker about suburban Flyoverland (in “The Big Country”): “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” For someone who assails urban-rural polarization and speculates in his final chapter about forms of symbiosis in a future Garden of Urban (“Could prefabricated timber urbanism, metropolitan agriculture, urban manufacturing, regional logistics, density imbued with biophilia, and ecosystem-based resource management all create equitable urban and rural prosperity such that both emerge stronger?”), the affinity with Byrne’s arch perspective raises compelling questions about the reception Chakrabarti invites.

For all the humor, rock references, and other worldly elements, his tone carries a hint of the pulpit. Chakrabarti proposes “a kind of Hippocratic oath for the design community” and embeds a similar list of mandates in the introduction. Will the intensity of this message help reframe blue-city/red-country discussions or be taken as hectoring enough to provoke counterattacks? He implicitly wagers that readers will interpret his directness as a sign of respect. Some may.

Progressive urbanists should naturally want Chakrabarti to succeed—for his remediations to match the power of his diagnostic incisiveness. Much depends on how PAU’s own practice stands up next to his own statements. Discussing projects built and proposed, the chapter “The TAU of PAU” assumes pivotal risks. Having declared what projects PAU will and will not take on (no work in autocracies, no elements of suburban sprawl, nothing involving enslaved workers, and so forth), Chakrabarti and colleagues practically dare their critics to lodge accusations of either virtue-signaling or hypocritical opportunism. 

As its projects’ prominence and complexity increase, PAU has arguably walked the walk and explored the big country. Many of the projects are located far from the coastal metropoles: the InterOculus street canopy in Columbus, Indiana; the expansion of I.M. Pei’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; the FAA’s telescoping air-traffic-control towers for smaller cities’ airports; Indianapolis’ Wave Bridge; and a nonlinear, non-gridded site plan and materially contextual buildings for Ulaanbaatar Village, in Mongolia. 

PAU projects closer to home include the adaptive reuse of Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Refinery; the mixed-use JFK Towers at Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Yards; a proposal for infill housing based on a “Goldilocks” density level (three-story construction) that enables transit without overwhelming neighborhood scale; and the Penn Station redesign proposed with ASTM and HOK in 2023. That project, should it achieve realization, would be the critical test, potentially relieving chronic transit nightmares while raising the question of balanced public and private benefits inherent in P3s. Former Governor Cuomo’s General Project Plan for Penn, many commentators argue, would disproportionately aid Vornado rather than the rail passengers or the neighborhood, and Hudson Yards likewise serves Related better than it does the public; in the proposed ASTM/HOK/PAU P3 for Penn, would infrastructure firm ASTM become another private tail wagging the public dog? 

As Chakrabarti’s visions of the built environment reach broader audiences, his talent for analytic precision and provocation is a double-edged sword. Some will simply reject his critiques, recoiling from the pugnacity that his more sympathetic readers find enjoyable. Others will question the tensions between his green prescriptions and his developer-clients’ record of adhering to them. How PAU handles its self-imposed challenges, intervening to promote urbanity (particularly at heartland sites) and maintaining clean hands under spotlights, will determine whether his critics’ all-too-easy responses to those tensions will outweigh the urgency of his diagnoses and the timeliness of his remedies.

Featured image: The Refinery at Dominos. Photo by Max Toubey, courtesy of  PAU.