Reviews » Archives » January 2008

Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th- and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl.

We humans don’t do catastrophe well until one hits us, if then. After all, our ancestors didn’t survive by planning a century ahead; they survived by spotting predators fast and stretching one harvest until the next.