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 1600-s 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
