Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City is the first book to assess the ideas and impact of Philadelphia's legendary city planner, who died in 2005. Ultimately, like all of us, the author wonders, "Where are we now as visionaries?"

Collaboration is intrinsic to Design Philadelphia, now in its fifth year the nation's largest and most ambitious celebration of design's potential to remake the world. Day to day, it's what fuels so many of the city's most inventive artists, designers and software developers.

Contractors, who haven't been without work for a decade, are sitting at home. Some, behind the Tundra's wheel, roam the city. There are bargains at the supply house but there's no reason to buy. There are laborers on the early bus with nowhere to go.

Northeastern, a restrained piece of neoclassical civic architecture with the look of a small city's high school, was erected while many doctors and nurses were in Europe treating the victims of World War I. Rumors have been circulating for a month that Temple will close the hospital or cut the number of beds from 231 to 40 or 50, or the O.R. and/or the maternity ward will be shuttered.

Berg's questions so often take such delicate form in the urban grime and delirium — in fragments of conversation on the trolley, in the summer's humidity, in a "garbage can erupting with the praise and grace of existence"— that his writing can't be separated from the city where he lives.

One doesn't need a book like this to understand the amalgam of failure, disappointment and resilience that the civil rights struggle produced. It's plainly here, in the sometimes disheartening, sometimes exhilarating fact of this great black city.

Owen, approaching mid-career, is feeling sober. In part, he means he's becoming a wiser, less self-conscious designer, more receptive to the nuances of a market already filled with smart objects. But this doesn't mean he's getting conservative. He's gained clarity, he says, a willingness to engage in a process that allows practical concerns like economics and manufacturing technology to inform design.

With all the jockeying, what seems clear is that no one knows what to do. Nearly every aspect of life here benefits from a donation, so much so that it feels like Daniel Ortega isn't the president of a country, rather of a nonprofit, surviving on the whim and generosity of donors.

What is it about Philadelphia that conditions, over and over, the same kind of response? It goes back to the combination of what was and what isn't. What isn't is a city that feels energized by the world around it. It's just not open enough. And that lack of openness leaves it feeling all too often more lackadaisical, somber, and somnolent than it should be. What was, of course, are the physical ruins of a city that in its scale, ambition, and architecture mirror the world's greatest.