Over the past two decades, Inga Saffron has served as the premier chronicler of the city’s physical transformation as it emerged from a half century of decline. Through her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns on architecture and urbanism in the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has tracked the city’s revival on a weekly basis. "Becoming Philadelphia" collects the best of Saffron’s work, plus a new introduction reflecting on the stunning changes the city has undergone. A fearless crusader who is also a seasoned reporter, Saffron ranges beyond the usual boundaries of architectural criticism to explore how big money and politics intersect with design, profoundly shaping our everyday experience of city life. Even as she celebrates Philadelphia’s resurgence, she considers how it finds itself grappling with the problems of success: gentrification, poverty, privatization, and the unequal distribution of public services.

Inga Saffron has served as the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1999 and has received numerous honors, including the Vincent Scully Prize, Harvard University’s Loeb Fellowship, and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She formerly worked as an Eastern European correspondent, witnessing the destruction of Grozny and Sarajevo, which sparked her interest in urban renewal.

Description courtesy of Rutgers University Press.

PA Books airs Sunday nights at 7.

Watch PA Books and more PA History and Culture on cable and the PCN Select Streaming Service.