Colin Rowe (1920-1999) profoundly influenced the discipline of urban design across the domains of theory, teaching, and practice. In his 1978 Collage City, co-authored with Fred Koetter, Rowe rebuked the hegemony of utopian Modernists proposals and projects that had proved devastating to the City.

Thirty-one essays by Rowe's former students, colleagues, and accomplished urbanists describe Rowe's life experiences and intellectual grounding in architecture, art criticism, psychology, and liberal philosophy, and how these informed his “urbanistics." One sees Rowe's graduate Urban Design Studio at Cornell (1962-1990) exploring historic models, techniques, and the emerging theories of Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City—the inclusive "city of composite presence.”

Rome's historic center emerges as exemplifying the complex relation of urban and architectural forms as a paradigm for contemporary practice. Other essays apprise built work that exhibits the scope and breadth of Rowe's international influence. These pages reveal Rowe's astute diagnosis of the contemporary city—“the present urban predicament”— including city planning's dubious embrace of social engineering, Modern architecture's exclusionary iconography, and its rejection of the "traditional city.”

For Rowe, the City served as an evolving record of the highest of human aspirations and cultural achievements, a setting enriching everyday experience, and the theater essential for the competition of ideas and powers fundamental to democracy. This volume is a testament to Rowe's optimistic prognosis: that it is possible to create healthy and sustainable cities through reasoned discourse, civic engagement, and the exercise of common sense.

684 pages  •  1,000+ illustrations—most in color  •  hardcover  •  7 pounds