Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC by Owen Hatherley. Repeater, 218 pp., $17.
Owen Hatherley is not from New York. In fact, as he tells us in his new work of architectural and social criticism Walking the Streets/ Walking the Projects, he has only been here twice. I got the sense at times that he was worried about being called an interloper by us ornery and parochial New Yorkers. His epigraph doesn’t just quote the cutting NYC hip hop group Cannibal Ox and our most left-wing mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, but also Sting’s stupid song “An Englishman in New York.” From the first line, however, Hatherley has us dead to rights.
“New York, like Paris, is paradise for a particular kind of urbanist,” he writes. Yes, it is, and seeing as that particular kind of urbanist is the exact readership of this publication, I highly recommend this insightful and inciteful guide to New York’s planning and architecture and—most critically—to the insipid ideology our city has produced regarding those two subjects.