The Imperfect City: Design, Serendipity, and the Real Life of Cities

A Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic explores how modern cities thrive when urban planning leaves room for happy accidents and innovations.

“A city is not a symphony, composed as a single work,” Paul Goldberger writes. “It is more like jazz, with its mix of order and improvisation.” The Imperfect City is a record of Goldberger’s looking, lingering, and thinking about cities—how they develop their character, how they affect us, and how they change. On this exhilarating journey around...