Last monday, Columbia University's Avery Hall was buzzing.
The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) hosted a highly attended event that welcomed respected academics and professionals from architecture and real estate to what the dean, Mark Wigley, warned might take the form a a celebrity roast. Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP Architects and director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia, was on deck to deliver an abridged, more "urban version" of a longer lecture on his new book, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America. Proceeding the twenty minute lecture, an "A-list" panel of architects and historians - that included Kenneth Frampton, Gwendolyn Wright, Bernard Tschumi, Laurie Hawkinson and Reinhold Martin - lined up to discuss Chakrabarti's work.
His thesis is precisely what the title suggests; we as architects, developers and planners must be leading a movement for a more urban America, a condition he equates to a better environment and economy leading to increased social-equity. Through a long-standing collaboration with big government and big business, citizens have participated in a scenario he has dubbed, "The American Scheme," or simply put, consumerism. As a result, millions of Americans have become indebted to houses, cars and healthcare, conforming to an adulterated, and government subsidized, offshoot of the original "American Dream." Chakrabarti claims the original dream had nothing to do with the ownership of a patch of lawn but of opportunity, quoting James Truslow Adams in 1931:
