The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History

by Spiro Kostof

Spanning the ages and the globe, Spiro Kostof explores the city as a "repository of cultural meaning" and an embodiment of the community it shelters. Widely used by both architects and students of architecture, The City Shaped won the AIA's prestigious book award in Architecture and Urbanism. With hundreds of photographs and drawings that illustrate Professor Kostof's innovative ideas, this has become one of the most important works on urbanization.

Genres: Architecture, History, Urbanism, Urban Planning, Cities, Nonfiction, Urban

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Spiro Konstantine Kostof was a leading architectural historian, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His books continue to be widely read and some are routinely used in collegiate courses on architectural history.

In 1993, following his death, the Society of Architectural Historians established the "Spiro Kostof Award," to recognize books "in the spirit of Kostof's writings," particularly those that are interdisciplinary and whose content focuses on urban development, the history of urban form, and/or the architecture of the built environment.

Reviews

[Andrew]

So this is a pretty good basic urbanism primer – I’m not sure how theoretically groundbreaking or whatever it is, but it is a series of thought-provoking accounts of why our cities are the way they are and look the way they do. Textbook-style knowledge but well-presented. I’m sure that this is going to function as something of a reference book for me, peregrine wanderer of cities and semiprofessional flaneur that I am.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Classic, I suppose, textbook for the history of Urban Design, I finally got around to dusting my 14 year old copy off to actually read (and now haltingly going through its sister edition, The City Assembled). This was definitely worth the effort. I constantly found myself scribbling urban diagrams, referencing particular city districts, page numbers, and jotting down solid quotes (the flâneur as the “Parisian compromise between laziness and activity”) that I’ll probably never look at again (indeed, the aforementioned quote is probably more a paraphrase as I’m too lazy to verify).

I don’t know why, but the book felt incomplete somehow. It’s ordered logically into themes like grid morphologies, radial cities, and so on and obviously any attempt at comprehensiveness for such a broad topic would be impossible. I haven’t gotten far in the companion volume - compiled at the same time I believe - so that’s probably the missing link. Other than occasional inconsistencies [sometimes its “218 feet (200 meters)” then the next page “200 meters (218 feet)” - c’mon, just say meters make more sense and place ‘em first!] I don’t have much criticism for this. The biggest annoyance is the lack of plans/images supplementing the text. In one case (page 173) he states “...as can be seen in a 1612 view” of some place yet there’s no 1612 view, or 1812 view, or any damn view to be found anywhere. He twice mentions a Brasilia scheme that also apparently didn’t make the final cut. And this was published before Google - which I might call something of a compromise between research and laziness. So that issue permeates the book but, all in all, I highly recommend this for any urban design enthusiast.

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its pretty damned impressive.

Instead of a typical comprehensive "history of the city," Kostof finds simple urban forms, such as "the grid" or "the boulevard," and traces their evolution and interpretation across hundreds of years. Not in any simple and easy to read chronological order, mind-you, but in a sort of inspired free association. In a few heavily illustrated pages he'll jump from the 8th century grid of Chinese capital Chang'an, and its monarchical and imperialistic tendencies, to the democratic Jeffersonian land survey of the US, to the extensions of medieval garrison towns in France.

On one hand I'm glad I read it all because its all worth reading, but its so dense and so convoluted that one's eyes can glaze over the pages of obscure names of small cities and long-dead kings. Flipping through it again makes me realize how much I missed.

[Mick de Waart · Rating 4 out of 5]

The City Shaped is a monument of a book. Spiro Kostof shows how city shapes the world over and ever since the first cities can be classified in a few categories, but emphasizes that urban shapes can never really be understood without knowing the social context they were created in.

While I thought Spiro Kostof's broad scope was immensely impressive—especially for the time—I did feel that it caused the examples he uses to lack depth. He never goes into much detail on how and why certain social contexts established certain spatial forms.

I definitely thought it was a worthwhile read, but I feel like more depth here and there would have helped deliver its most important messages better.

[Brad B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Kostof's writing style pretty dry, but the content of The City Shaped is fascinating. This book is perfectly fine for laypersons (like myself), really anyone who is interested in the reasons behind the layout of our cities. (Kostof wrote a later volume, The City Assembled, which makes for a complimentary read with this one.)

[Samer Momani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up between different countries, this book answered a personal nagging question of why different towns or countries (streets and urban/rural landscapes) look different. It explains how “human settlements” evolved throughout history, focusing on street patterns, and placement of key community buildings and plazas/markets. The book is generally focused on European towns. It may be initially difficult to read due to dense concepts presented but also because the author frequently combined multiple ideas into one sentence. If you like it, I suggest to look up work by Andres Duany and Camillo Sitte, among others. The author taught architecture at UC-Barkley and passed away in 1991 while finalizing a similar book with the title “the City Assembled”, which also a great read.

[UrbanPlanner_Shafaat · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Cities in their physical aspect are stubbornly long-lived” (Kostof 1991, 40) while all other historical records of the life in these cities seem to fade with time. Kostof (1991) rejects the rational approach of reading urban design on the premise that certain factors cannot be attributed to the making of similar city shape everywhere or anytime.

He mentions how similar city forms occurred in different parts of the world during varying periods (thus beyond the dimensions of time and space). Therefore he highly asserted, and I agree to this, that urban revolutions flared independently in different parts of the world. This, hence, gives an opportunity to see birth of cities as result of social systems rather than imported models from faraway places.

I find Kostof (1991, 33) very smart when he puts all the social, economic, political, military (and so on) factors under the single world umbrella of authority as generating force of a city. This way his theory becomes so vast that other theories could simply find their place inside his. And accordingly, the historical record from pre-industrial to the industrial and socialist cities could easily be understood as the consequence of the social transformations occurred in the society.

To end this response, I would be eager to quote Kostof (1991, 16): “…whether born under divine guidance or the speculative urge, the pattern will dry up, and even die, unless the people forge within it a special, self-sustaining life that can survive adversity and the turns of the fortune”. Hence what remains most significant for cities through history is the people who make the city and not the extra-human factors of it.

[JOHN JUNG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent Book. I pulled it off my shelf after 30 years. Yikes. It was a reference book that I purchased in England when it first came out. But over this holiday season I decided to really read it and it is excellent although some direct images related to the text seem missing. I can't complain to the author since he is no longer with us. But it still resonates with me after all of these decades. I recommend getting hold of a copy, if you can. Besides, it has terrific images and worth keeping around as a coffee table book for your friends and family, especially young folks to become inspired to become city-builders in the future!

[Checkman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting reading. Cities and the societies that build them are inexorably linked. As a result, the cities are often a reflection of those cities. This book is now thirty-five years old and no longer the groundbreaker that it was perceived to be in 1991. Perhaps it wasn't then either, but regardless I found this to be a fascinating read. Sometimes it is good to go into areas that are outside of one's comfort zone. This is one of those times. I took a chance when I found my copy in a thrift store. It sat in my library for over ten years, but I finally cracked it opened, and it wasn't a disappointment. Recommended.

[Mike Crough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of detail which can make for perhaps a challenging first read, but amazing illustrations and graphics, and thoughtful discussion throughout. Five stars on a first reading, for a work that I expect to get better with each successive read.

[Raina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of information, interpretation, and analysis. Extremely clear, very thought-provoking.

[Prajakta Ravi Vemula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book

[Andaz Yaran]

besy

[Matt Huffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Develops a different frame of reference for thinking about city creation and makes a good argument for being able to describe a city’s culture by its infrastructure/planning.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a history of urban forms, The City Shaped is full of a lot of interesting insights into how and why various planners (both public and private) have chosen certain layouts for cities, and how human patterns of usage both are and aren't shaped by the forms those planners have tried to choose for them. As an example, the grid pattern has been both praised and criticized for seemingly contradictory things - it supposedly either constrains human behavior and forces them into lifeless, regimented order; or it's an efficient, predictable substrate that encourages growth, simplifies transportation, and democratizes the cityscape. Not that forms are completely neutral, but humans are a lot more adaptable then any other animal, which is why our civic forms don't play the same role that the honeycomb does to the hive. Kostof has a dizzying array of examples of how seemingly similar patterns can result in very different cityscapes, in the same culture and even in the same city. Take boulevards, which used to be primarily roads marking the boundary between city and country before they became synonymous with avenues: Berlin's aristocratic Unter den Linden contrasts with its socialist-era Stalinallee as well as Vienna's bourgeois Ringstrasse, to say nothing of Paris' monumental Champs-Elysée, Chicago's commercial paradise of the Magnificent Mile, or New York's Broadway.

This two-way street (sorry) between people and urban building blocks informs the organization of the book. Kostof will take a topological concept, like that of the "organic plan" (as opposed to that soulless grid; ironically, deliberately "organic" patterns usually require much more advance planning than a grid, and as a result put more constraints on the lives of residents), describe its typical usage and variations throughout history, and enumerate examples of how different societies have used that idea, what it meant to them, and what the eventual effects were on the lives of the people who had to live in the end product. Small things, like Baron Hausmann's attempts to make the facades of Parisian buildings consistent, as they are to this day, can be looked at as either heavy-handed government conformity projects or as as insightful bit of forethought that has given the city such a famous, beloved aspect that it's literally illegal to change it now. Some of the best and most interesting parts were where Kostof examined utopian ideals of planning, which have a long history dating back to Plato's Republic and even before. He drew an interesting parallel between plans intended for surveillance, like Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon, and the radial plans of settlements where where power was designed to be at the center. What is it that makes designers of social systems think that they need to design cities as well? What makes them think it will be effective?

The book seem to jump around and digress a bit, since it's organized by urban form, but it's no less interesting for it. You see repeatedly cities designed as market towns, military camps, defensive bastions, population overflow catchments, religious centers, administrative capitals, communes, ports, and all sorts of things trying to find their identity while being prodded from all directions, and the way that cities grow and change over time is really interesting to see, especially with all the neat illustrations. Unfortunately the book has a really bad and weak ending - Kostof hates skyscrapers and lauds attempts to reduce them, in passages as meaningless as they are full of high-flown rhetoric. He puts in a lot of confused ideological-aesthetic verbiage about how skyscrapers are symbols of the excesses of capitalism and how they destroy the character of cities. I personally think that skyscrapers not only look really cool, they are incredibly useful for allowing large numbers of people to get together and make livings without having to sprawl out in all directions. Kostof does not deign to actually run any numbers on how expensive and environmentally damaging his anti-skyscraper stance is, but if you stop reading before that section or just stick to looking at its pictures you will have read a very interesting and comprehensive survey on an underappreciated topic. You certainly won't look at the next plaza you see in the same way again.

[Gary Reger · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this magisterial book, Spiro Kostof--who died the year it was published--reviews the ways that cities have been designed and experienced over 5000 years and across the globe. "It is," he writes, "about urban form and urban process. More specifically, it is a discussion of some patterns and elements of urban form seen in a historical perspective" (p. 9, his emphasis).

Across five long and lavishly illustrated chapters, he explains how cities evolve over time or, sometimes, are created all at once by a master planner. He nuances the long-standing contrast between "organic" cities, often said to have no plan, and planned ones--all cities, even those that grow over time, are subject to planning, simply because human beings make decisions about what to build, where, and how. (Michael E. Smith elaborates on Kostof's observations in an article in the 2007 number of The Journal of Planning History.)

Urban plans come in all shapes and sizes; Kostof seeks to categorize them into groups that include examples from the full range of time and space he covers. His categories are neither mechanical nor arbitrary, but carefully articulated and explained and justified in great depth. One result is the discovery that similar plans have cropped up quite independently across history.

It's impossible to do this rich, evocative book justice in a few words. It asks to be savored, a task made easy by Kostof's beautiful, vivid prose and the abundance of well-chosen figures, which include over 30 color plates.

He refers occasionally to a companion volume, The City Assembled, which appeared in the year after his death. It's next on my list!

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

-Cities can grow organically or have organizational frameworks, usually a little of both.
-Social ideals are reflected in city planning.
-The grid contains as many deviations as regularities.
-If you understand changes to your environment, your surroundings make more sense.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. If you are into the philosophy of urban space and/or planning, this is your shit. Wow. Kostof's appreciation for the allocation of space and the cultural repercussions therein are well worth wading through the reference-like presentation. A great take on urban anthropology.

[Anahita]

The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History

[kathryn]

reading for school. is nice base in city form.

read chapters 1-4(or 5)

i would be interested in checking out his "sequel," The City Assembled.

[Margaret]

borrowed for GDP. used briefly in Robson Square Studio.
worth more attention.

[Theo 'coco']

good

[John Andrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better illustrations than Mumford's book but not nearly as interesting to read