Variations on a Theme

Eight essays by architects and academics criticize as elitist and alienating such contemporary urban and extra-urban phenomena as mega-malls, historical re-creations and gentrification. Margaret Crawford uses Canada's West Edmonton Mall as a paradigm of the consumption-oriented pleasure dome. Langdon Winner offers a chilling analysis of Silicon Valley (``a vast suburb with no central city to give it meaning''), while Neil Smith discusses the greed and injustices that accompany the gentrification of New York's Lower East Side. And M. Christine Boyer dissects New York's South Street Seaport as an example of ``historicized, commodifed, and privatized places.'' Nearly all the writers take easy aim at yuppies, as both perpetrators of inequality and victims of consumerist illusions, who care little about the poor and homeless excluded from these havens of affluence. In much softer focus, though, are the governments that have so tragically failed our cities. This bias detracts from an overall thought-provoking collection on our urban malaise. Sorkin is former architecture critic of the Village Voice. (Feb.)