Urban Spaces and Oceans of Science

City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World,
HarperCollins, 1995, $27
by Witold Rybczynski, BArch'66, MArch'72

Think of the view of Montreal from the Mount Royal lookout, or the sudden appearance of the Toronto skyline as you travel east on the Gardiner Expressway. The immensity of a city can be experienced, but not so easily defined. Like any complicated art form, cities require a bit of work in order to be understood and appreciated. Witold Rybczynski's book is a good place to start.

City Life is an overview of some of the diverse, disjointed and downright serendipitous influences that have shaped the modern-day metropolis. The 10 chapters aren't obviously linked by an over-reaching thesis, but collectively they create a picture of urban evolution. Rybczynski examines the historical roots of urban design in an effort to explain why North American cities differ from those in Europe. He zeroes in on New World individualism and attitudes about progress and change. Most major European cities date back to medieval or ancient times. Monuments and public squares were built by omnipotent monarchs, and the great cathedrals reflected single-denomination societies. New world cities evolved in a more democratic and secular time.

We are a transient population, constantly demolishing and redeveloping our cityscapes. Each new trend, adopted and then discarded, has been incorporated into the urban patchwork. The result may be sprawling, but it contains some interesting enclaves. The "city beautiful" and "garden suburb" movements are responsible for enduring, popular neighbourhoods like Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia (where Rybczynski now lives), Montreal's Town of Mount Royal, or Leaside in Toronto. In other cases, such as urban renewal and the modernist approach for housing the poor, we've ended up with uninhabitable highrise ghettos.

Rybczynski relates how visionary local governments, architects and planners sought to create compelling urban vistas by forging boulevards and public spaces in many American cities. Often they were waylaid by economic forces dictating the pace and style of development. Real estate speculators, selling lots on the grid system, were the default designers of many North American cities.

The book focuses largely on American cities, with some anecdotal examples from Montreal and Toronto. This works well enough for the historical background, but doesn't recognize the safe and vibrant modern Canadian city. Nor does the Canadian experience fit Rybczynski's hypothesis that shopping malls have become the new downtowns. (His example of Plattsburgh, New York, seems an obscure choice on which to base an argument, in any case.) Shopping malls may be "alternative" downtowns, but in cities like Montreal and Toronto they're not about to replace traditional commercial districts.

Still, the book is certainly not lacking in substance. Rybczynski has an extremely comprehensive approach where every observation and argument is supported with details and examples. Some photos and illustrations could have strengthened the extensive descriptions of urban design, but his prose is precise and his style much more accessible than the many urban historians and academics he so ably interprets and summarizes. The resulting book illuminates and entertains.

- Barbara G. Carss
Canadian Property Management magazine.

Essays From a Life: Scotland, Canada, Greenland, Denmark
McGill University Libraries, 1995, $35
by Max Dunbar, PhD'41

Max Dunbar (1914-1995) was a distinguished oceanographer who pioneered marine studies in the Canadian Arctic and directed the work of some 75 graduate students as professor of zoology and director of the Institute of Oceanography at McGill. This is a personal, delightfully- written collection of essays on experiences that underpinned his scientific achievements.

Born in Scotland, Dunbar joined the McGill faculty in 1946. There he initiated the first continuing program of oceanographic study in the Canadian Arctic, establishing a full-time laboratory and designing the first vessel built in Canada specifically for Arctic oceanography. In his nearly 60 years of active research, he made major contributions to the identification of ecological zones in northern seas, to relationships between climate change and variations in animal distributions, and to the study of polar ecosystems, and wrote nearly 200 scientific articles.

The "series of chapters" of which Dunbar's life, as he saw it, had been comprised, tell us of his stimulating family and splendid Edinburgh schools, with their rich curriculum and able teachers (of Greek, Latin, "serious" English, music and rugby), and of his student days at Oxford, Yale and McGill. They describe early journeys to Greenland and on the famous old Nascopie (ship), his term in Greenland as Canadian consul during the war, and the later research in the Canadian Arctic with the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. And they tell of his great interest in music, perhaps at one time a rival to science as a career, and throughout his life a major pleasure. One of Dunbar's proudest achievements was his recording of Scottish border ballads, which adds personal insight to this public scientist. Those who knew Dunbar will sense his presence on every page. Those who did not know him will wish they had.

- E.H. Grainger
Oceanographer, retired, Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans