Becoming Philadelphia

Over the last 20 years, as Philadelphia emerged from a half century of decline, Inga Saffron has been the premier chronicler of the city's physical transformation. Through her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns on architecture and urbanism in the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has tracked the city's revival on an almost week-by-week basis. Once dismissed as an industrial has-been - the "Next Detroit" - Philadelphia has enjoyed an astonishing come-back in first decades of the 21st Century. Yet, like other resurgent cities, it now finds itself grappling with the problems of success: gentrification, poverty, density debates, the unequal distribution of public services and the lure of privatization.

A fearless crusader who is also a seasoned reporter, Saffron ranges beyond the usual boundaries of architectural criticism to explore how politics and money intersect with design and profoundly shape our everyday experience of city life. She is the watchdog of Philadelphia's built environment, a champion of its architectural heritage, an advocate for using design to foster democracy and equity. A born explainer, she makes architecture accessible and entertaining; she even manages to extract meaning from the most technical zoning debates. That combination of qualities helped win her the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2014 and the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in 2018.

This volume culls the best of Saffron's work from the last 20 years. What emerges in these 80 pieces is a remarkable narrative of a remarkable time. The proverbial first draft of history, these columns tell the story of what a great city looked like as it shape-shifted before our very eyes.