The Unfinished Metropolis by Benjamin Schneider

In The Unfinished Metropolis, Benjamin Schneider explores why America’s favorite things to build—freeways, single-family homes, malls, and downtown office towers—are keeping us stuck in the past. We deserve cities where housing is abundant, public transit is fast and seamless, and streets are for more than car storage. To accomplish this, we need to free ourselves from these outdated forms so we can experiment with new types of housing, new uses for streets, and new purposes for downtowns. We need to embrace the art of city-building. Talking to urban designers, planners, and community advocates, Schneider takes readers on an insightful and entertaining tour of how we can make our cities work better for us today and into the future.    

Consider your surroundings. Maybe you’re in a house or in an apartment building. Maybe you’re at a desk in an office building, or in a café looking out on a lively main street. The urban landscape is not simply the backdrop to your life. It determines, to a remarkable degree, what kind of life you’re able to live. Today, the horizons of American life are constrained by a built environment that has not significantly changed since the 1970s.

American cities used to constantly evolve, experimenting with new urban designs and ambitious infrastructure projects, from railroads and subways to public housing and shopping malls. But now we keep pursuing the same 20th century urban development plans—freeways, downtown office towers, suburban housing developments. This pattern is why Americans are so dependent on their cars, why housing is so expensive and homelessness is at crisis levels, and why downtowns are struggling and communities are fraying.

In The Unfinished Metropolis, Benjamin Schneider argues that city-building is a lost art. We need to embrace new transportation technologies, new types of housing, new ways to use streets other than for cars and parking. In this insightful and entertaining tour of the built environment, Schneider explores common urban designs that shape our lives and color our cultural imagination: office parks, apartments, single family homes, and transit systems. He explains how these forms came to be, why they no longer function as promised, and introduces readers to the advocates and professionals around the country who are working on transformative new solutions. Learning from past mistakes, we can remake our cities and create better lives for ourselves and future generations.