The North Atlantic Cities

Great insight on urban development and urban life through the lens of architecture

Spans across 400 years of architecture and development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States

The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of 400 years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few.

The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered - the row house, which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world’s great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600s to today as the author theorises, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay and the worst catastrophes of global climate change.