Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space
Michael Sorkin (Editor)
Hill and Wang, 1992

Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | 252 pages | 9 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0374523145 | $20.00

Publisher's Description:
America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.dDAB Commentary: On Thursday evening I sat down to compose a review for this blog for the following day, when a text alerted me to the death of Michael Sorkin, the great architecture critic and a mentor of mine. I studied under Sorkin in the Urban Design program at the City College of New York back in 2006 and 2007. Although a short, two-semester graduate degree, the UD program led to lastin...