The Imperfect City

A Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic explores how modern cities thrive when urban planning leaves room for happy accidents and innovations

“A city is not a symphony, composed as a single work,” Paul Goldberger writes. “It is more like jazz, with its mix of order and improvisation.”

The Imperfect City recounts Goldberger’s looking, lingering, and thinking about cities—how they develop their character, how they affect us, and how they change. On this exhilarating journey around the world, Goldberg points out each city’s notable qualities, from the eco-friendly features of Singapore’s skyscrapers, to the collision and coexistence of old and new in Rome, to the boldly imagined lakefront in Chicago. He wanders the picturesque canals of Amsterdam, sets off down the jagged slash of Broadway across Manhattan’s grid, and follows the poetic tributaries of Los Angeles’s freeway ramps.

Goldberg brings the world’s best and brightest city planners to life on these pages, some bidding for immortality, others possessed with a mission to turn a city into art. What emerges is a sweeping portrait of the often haphazard, half-thought-through elements that sometimes give identity and charm to a place and sometimes turn out to be eyesores. Drawn from a lifetime of appreciation, dating back to his own tender-aged first arrivals in Manhattan, Paris, and beyond, this warm and brilliant book shows that the joy of urban experience comes not from seeking the perfection of order, but from embracing the energy, beauty, and unpredictability of cities at their best. The Imperfect City helps us to understand how cities, and people, truly evolve—by luck, accident, and design.