Philip Kasinitz
New York University Press, New York, 2003, 1995, English
Nonfiction, Urban Design
ISBN: 9780814746394
On 1 book list
Zoë Ryan

A fantastic compendium of texts on the city, including American historian Lewis Mumford’s 1938 essay “The Culture of Cities,” in which he includes this memorable description of city life. “By the diversity of its time-structures, the city in part escapes the tyranny of a single present, and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past. Through its complex orchestration of time and space, no less than through the social division of labor, life in the city takes on the character of a symphony: specialized human aptitudes, specialized instruments, give rise to sonorous results which, neither in volume nor in quality, could be achieved by any single piece.”

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