The Intimate City
by Witold Rybczynski
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Jun 2026 on The Ezra Klein Show.
The general take
Ezra Klein credits Michael Kimmelman's The Intimate City with fundamentally changing how he sees New York, specifically through Kimmelman's idea that the city's beauty comes from jarring juxtapositions. Klein found it genuinely transformative—a single sentence from the book reshaped his entire perspective on the place.
About
“‘ The Intimate City ’ is a joyful miscellany of people seeing things in the urban landscape, the streets alive with remembrances and ideas even when those streets are relatively empty of people.” —Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times architecture critic, his celebrated walking tours of New York City, now expanded, covering four of the five boroughs and some 540 million years of history, accompanied by some of the people who know it best As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction.
Who said what
Ezra Klein👍 Recommends
…discovering beauty in urban spaces through architectural perspective
“Michael Kimmelman, when I moved here, which was only a couple years ago, I read Michael Kimmelman, his book called The Intimate City. And he says, the beauty of New York is the juxtaposition of this with that. And that allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a single sentence that reshaped how I looked at a whole place.”
The Ezra Klein Show — I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novelat 48:08
Listener reviews
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