Writer Avi Friedman is an award-winning housing innovator and professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture who, through his many books and lectures, has proved his passionate dedication to the business of roofs-over-heads, both private and public.
In his latest book, A Place in Mind, Mr. Friedman presents a collection of formulaic essays which are at once subjective and didactic. Each begins with a detailed description of a place with him in it (a courtyard, apartment complex, restaurant, market, etc.). He leads us down laneways and crowded city streets and eventually, to an analysis of whether the place is “successful” and “authentic” or whether it is a blight on the community. This judgment soon gives way to a set of rhetorical questions à la Carrie Bradshaw in which Mr. Friedman stops and wonders, for example, “Have the digital media become the new people’s square?” or “Can we retool or alter existing suburban communities?”
Friedman then offers a brief look at the history of each place or architectural structure. His talents really shine in these passages. The village square, the market, the playground, the office: the back-story of how each evolved is explained with clarity and focus, and is utterly tangent-free. But here the stories often take a grumpy turn and the scholarship gives way to nostalgia as the writer becomes unfairly critical of the new world and romantically reverential of the old. Readers are bound to be disenchanted by the sweeping repudiation of all ways North American (why no recognition of New Yorkers’ revolutionary use of public space?), not to mention the odd hyperbolic statement like “…we do not chat with neighbours in grocery lines because groceries can be ordered online.”
To say that walking is good, too much TV is bad, and they don’t make things like they used to, is simply to state the obvious. And to a certain extent, so is “Zoning bylaws need to be altered.” What most of us do need is instruction on how we can push for better buildings and more forward-thinking human-scapes. How does an empty lot become a park or public square instead of a condo? Why aren’t apartment buildings being built anymore? Isn’t it architects, designers, and planners who decide what gets built and where? How can class—the pink elephant in the room of all city planning problems—be incorporated into solutions that raise up the level of community involvement and ultimately “success”?
That cities are crumbling or morphing into McTowns is not a surprise to many urban and suburban dwellers. A call to action is needed but won’t happen without leaders and visionary guides like Mr. Friedman. And while A Place in Mind proposes an agenda, it falls short on details and specific targets that could call us to action.
Joni Dufour is a freelance editor and writer, and fiction editor for carte blanche.
