Review: River Cities, City Rivers, edited by Thaïsa Way

In 2015, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection devoted its annual Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium to a topic larger than any of those that had long constituted the library's scholarly fare. Announcing the symposium title “River Cities: Historical and Contemporary,” organizer Thaïsa Way invited historians, urban planners, landscape architects, and others focused on the interactions of cities and their riverine environments to consider rivers more subtly and comprehensively than simply, as she puts it in the introduction to this volume, “as landscapes in themselves or as agents of urban formation” (1). The papers presented at the symposium—the first of several city-focused conferences supported by Dumbarton Oaks' Mellon...