Prologue
In 1959, as a graduating student from McGill architecture school in Montreal, I set out on a study trip sponsored by the Canadian Central Mortgage and Housing corporation. Five students, one from each of the five architecture schools in the country, we traveled through the suburbs and downtowns of American and Canadian cities at the height of the suburban explosion. Having moved to Montreal from Israel only a few years earlier, I relished this eight-week voyage as my first true exposure to the North American pattern of urbanization that seemed to be leading the way for the rest of the world.

Traveling from the dense Northeast to the Midwest and West coast, I found myself repeatedly and profoundly impressed by the force of suburbanization -- the desire for dispersal outward from city after city, and the ubiquitous dream of individually owning one's house and garden. Yet all five of us were particularly charmed by our visits to downtown San Francisco, Georgetown in Washington, DC, and Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. The attached, compact buildings stepping up the hills in San Francisco, the brick houses lining the streets of Georgetown, and the elegant, well-defined urban square in Philadelphia were all reminders of the vitality of places where people of diverse backgrounds mingled, of the idealized image of cities we each carried in our mind's eye. These places convinced us of the merits of traditional urbanity, and the necessity for its revitalization.

In contrast was the inhuman and monotonous stacking of people in high-rise buildings -- mostly public housing projects -- in and around central cities. And even then, you could already see the emerging replacements for our once grand and vital urbanity: the great malls in the suburbs, the endless highway strips, and the winding streets of identical single-family houses. It seemed to me that urbanism's darkest hour was upon eo us: with the affluent escaping to the suburbs, poverty and dilapidation were coming to dominate most of downtown.

At the time, I was coming to realize the paradox of contemporary urbanism: the dream of a home and garden that are distant from the ills of the city alongside a desire for the vitality of downtown. I translated this paradox into an architectural challenge: to invent a building type that provided the lifestyle of a house with a garden, but that was compact enough to be constructed in the central city. This way, you could have your cake and eat it too, I thought --live within reach of the vital center and enjoy the amenities of a suburban house.

"For everyone a garden" was the way I phrased this goal for myself, the inspiration for a new type of urban living. Returning to McGill, I canceled my earlier plan to design the Israeli Knesset as my thesis project and instead proposed a project to develop a new concept for urban housing. I began constructing large models out of Lego, stacking plastic blocks representing houses one on top of the other, each one forming a roof garden for the unit above. Experimenting with various patterns, I built frames in which the houses were suspended, and sketched out traditional shop-lined streets both on the ground and in the air. This was to lead two years later to Habitat '67, a project I designed and constructed as part of the 1967 world's fair in Montreal. Habitat, as built, focused on the tension between singlefamily houses and high-rise apartment buildings: if people could have a house with a garden in the city center, I thought, they might no longer feel compelled to leave the city for the suburbs. The project was as dense as traditional apartment buildings, yet provided gardens, privacy, and individual identity. I believed this design strategy might become a model as a remedy for the inhuman conditions of high-rise public housing complexes, as well as for "luxury" housing in the city.

Three decades later, I realize that by reducing it to purely architectural terms, I had misunderstood the paradox of the contemporary city. During the 1960s, we architects felt we could make a difference: we could influence the character of urban development, revitalize downtowns, and stabilize suburban sprawl. We continued to think of the city in traditional historical terms, with a cohesive center surrounded by suburbs -- a radiating pattern of density and intensity set within a rural region -- and focused primarily on the meaning of, and the need for, the traditional downtown. Could the affluent who had left over the previous two decades be convinced to live there again? Could civic institutions be revitalized and strengthened? Could the slums be rehabilitated, or should they be replaced?

These interests were not primarily altruistic on the part of architects. Rather, the business and intellectual communities understood at the time that the whole urban environment could not function with a rotten core. It was simply assumed that the functioning of contemporary society depended on what I have come to term "interactive centers," consolidated places for urban life. Yet while architects, intellectuals, and politicians discussed these issues, suburbanization only intensified. We now recognize that the fundamental problems of the past decades represent complex economic and technological...