An Urban Critic's Tale

“What makes a good autobiography? At the top of the list are entertaining stories, lots of them, shared candidly by the author as you’re taken on the tour of a life."

And that is what I do in my new book An Urban Odyssey: A Critic’s Search for the Soul of Cities and Self (Academic Studies Press), so writes the critic Michael Crosbie in a praiseworthy review in the respected design website Common Edge, which I’ve immodestly abridged here:

Read it. You might like it. And buy it, now that it’s into as second printing. Crosbie did, as he writes:

“Kaplan has led a varied seven-decade career as a print and broadcast journalist, an architecture and urban critic, and sometime urban planner and educator. The book is about the importance of place, and about what makes a great city, formulated over a personal odyssey steered more by chance and opportunity than some grand plan….

“A childhood in Brooklyn in the 1930s and ’40s started him on his career as an observer and champion of urban life. “The Stoop, and City Beyond,” the book’s first chapter, is dedicated to the important lessons Kaplan learned about what makes a place a neighborhood, and what makes a neighborhood an important piece of a city,” observes Crosbie.

“The stoop was, technically, a collective private space, used publicly for the immediate families living there and invited others His description of how the stoop is transformed through these … gatherings is beautiful: “

“Sitting on the concrete steps or the low sidewall, or a faded foldout beach chair taken from an apartment, a grandstand was formed of the exterior steps, a stage set of sorts, offering views of the interminable gabbing, lounging residents and the passing parade of characters on the sidewalk, or to make room for a stoopball game, to watch, cheer, and bet on.”

What makes this scene important? Asks Crosbie, then answers. “ It’s the people, and Kaplan reminds us of this through Shakespeare’s insightful observation: “What is the city but the people?” As he explored the many shades and colors of urban fabric around the world, Kaplan found variations of his Flatbush stoop in sidewalks and streets, “squares, parks, and playgrounds,” along with “varied vestigial scenes, such as the iconic local stoops.”

For Kaplan, these places are “the existential life of the city, its ‘genius loci.’” They are the city’s soul.”

The review continues, with me a born and illbred New Yorker going on to write for the New York Times and host of other newspapers. And then in time migrating to the West, to become an urbanism and architecture critic for The Los Angeles Times, an Emmy award winning television commentator, and a sometime idiosyncratic urban planner and adjunct professor.
For the full review, tap, https://commonedge.org/tales-of-an-urban-critic-a-search.../, and enjoy.

Though of note to my followers on local social media, not commented on are my exploits as an activist resident of Malibu. For that you have to read the book, the paperback now on sale at Amazon.