Urbanism & Urban Planning

To NEW YORK CITY
where I came to seek my fortune
and found it by finding
Bob, Jimmy, Ned and Mary
for whom this book is written too

/

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.

Each letter of the Latin alphabet is assigned a drawing of a tree from the NYC Parks Department’s existing native and non-native trees, as well as species that are to be planted as a result of the changing climate. For example, A = Ash.

...The New York City Tree Alphabet is an alphabetical planting palette, allowing us to rewrite the urban landscape by planting messages around the city with real trees. What messages would you like to see planted?

An illustrated account of the development of urban form, written by Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), who was the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970. The work looks at the many aspects that influence city design, including spatial form, interactions between humans, nature and the built environment, perception of favorable environments, color, and perspective. Bacon also explores the growth of cities from early Greek and Roman times to Philadelphia's design in the 1960s. It is considered a seminal text on urban planning.

But over the past decade, Boston has fallen ill with a grave case of the Architecture of Right Now. Featureless glass — or even worse, plastic-cladded — high-rises in a minimalist or deconstructive style have been steadily replacing or crowding out beloved older buildings. As the new structures, which overwhelmingly lack traditional architectural elements or ornamentation, ooze across more of what used to be a defiantly unique cityscape, the overall effect is like that of being conquered by especially tasteless barbarians.

A slim cataloguing of the rich diversity of small vehicles that help shape street life in the world’s largest city

Problem

There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.

Solution

In any urban area, no matter how dense, keep the majority of buildings four stories high or less. It is possible that certain buildings should exceed this limit, but they should never be buildings for human habitation.

Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?

Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but

neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.

Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.

With the beginning of the exit from mining, the colliery apartments were gradually privatized. The houses, in which several families used to live, were divided into two semi-detached houses. At some point the new owners began - each for himself - to design their property. The result was a curious mix of styles in the semi-detached house.

My article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns.

If it’s not just “trees on buildings”, where does the Imperial Boy picture get its magic? Looking at it carefully and trying to analyze what I like about it, I think that much of it is about architecture, and even more of it is about the use of urban space — about how the structures in the picture shape the kinds of things you’d do if you were there. For example, here are five things I like:

1. Open, walkable multi-level retail
2. River with low bank
3. Walkable streets
4. Varied architecture
5. Shade

Recall that great line from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose

How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

Only, here, it’s some lonely postal worker—or a geography Ph.D. driven mad by student debt—out mapping the frayed edges of the world, wearily noting every new dead-end and cul-de-sac in a gridded notebook, diagramming loops, sketching labyrinths and mazes, driving empty streets all day on a quest for something undefinable, some answer to why the world’s patterns have gone so wrong. A self-diverging world, where things only almost meet.

The film traces the rise of one of the world's premier architects, Norman Foster, and his unending quest to improve the quality of life through design.

There are lots of actions that skirt the boundary between “formal” and “informal” urbanism. In the last decade, there’s been a rise in tactical urbanism and guerrilla urbanism, where regular people make interventions in their communities. This ranges from hastily painted bike lanes, to do-it-yourself park benches in under-served communities.

Since tall buildings have been around, there have been many ways they’ve fit into cities: towers in downtown, towers in the park, and most recently, towers on a whole-block development. Let’s look at a 4th way, the Tower in the Village.

Unlike the others, the Tower in the Village does not aim to be the center of attention. Instead, the upper floors are hidden behind a low front that fits in with the rest of the block. It faces a village green instead of a busy road.

Why highrise infill? Growing cities have two choices: 1) Redevelop a lot of sites to medium density, or 2) Redevelop a small number of sites to very high density. Highrise infill requires less demolition and can get more homes built faster.

Las Vegas was regarded as a "non-city" and as an outgrowth of a "strip", along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches and bars. The research group studied various aspects of the city, including the commercial vernacular, lighting, patterns, styles, and symbolism in the architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown created a taxonomy for the forms, signs, and symbols they encountered. The two were inspired by the emphasis on sign and symbol they found on the Las Vegas strip. The result was a critique of Modern architecture, demonstrated most famously in the comparison between the "duck" and "decorated shed."

For now there are moments of stunning humanity, a short term triumph even, of human over computer. Because what we are witnessing here is a reversal of the mold, in which humans input a massive amount of data into a computer that outputs something new and searchable. Here the computer is the input that the human scans, learns from, trains on, eventually outputting something magnificent.

...Lately, Rainbolt has been traveling the world, and is letting us in on the secrets he has seen in the data. Did you know that square stone fences with circle holes are only found in Chiang Mai, red stop signs with white font are only found in New South Wales, and the Wooden poles are cut in an octagonal shape only in Sydney? It's exciting to see him get off the computer and traveling the world in real life. Rainbolt is a modern explorer, an internet savant, and he’s been training at home so that his trip can be even more interesting. Maybe the internet won't just swallow us whole. Maybe we'll use it to appreciate just how distinctive humanity really is.

In every world city, midsized and above, there are always one or two neighborhoods where you can get everything you need, either by walking, or paying for delivery. This is almost always the same part of the city where tourists go, so not surprisingly, everyone thinks every city is more walkable than their own.

Yet, that to me isn’t what walkability is, which shouldn’t be a function of a resident’s wealth or location, rather it should reflect the modal experience, or what most residents experience on a daily basis.

What is walkability?

• Density
• Localized distribution
• Proper Infrastructure
• An extensive public transportation system
• Connectedness
• Good climate / low crime /low pollution
• Cool things to want to walk to

Our goal in archiving the work of Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure is to make it accessible throughout the world to all those who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive.

If you’re familiar with a final product, looking at the early ideas can be disconcerting. Things seem familiar but wrong, as can be seen in this 1870s map with a proposal for Morningside Park. The Upper West Side was pretty sparsely populated at that time because of the difficulties in getting there, and that goes doubly so for the area now called Morningside Heights.

Derek Thompson, writer of Work in Progress at The Atlantic and host of Plain English, joins Jon to talk about the future of remote work. Is remote work good or bad? Is it here to stay? How can we make it work for all of us? Derek offers up his perspective, makes the case that “quiet quitting” is a fake trend, and talks about why he’s hopeful that, despite America’s “bad vibes,” we’ll be able to figure this all out.

We simulate over 2.4 billion trips across every urban area in the world to measure street network vulnerability to disasters, then measure the relationships between street network design and these vulnerability indicators.

...All else equal, networks with higher connectivity, fewer chokepoints, and less circuity are less vulnerable to disruption. But (for example) even the otherwise dense, connected Amsterdam is easy to disconnect by targeting its chokepoints (like canal bridges).

Given all of the downsides of asphalt, you might ask "why is asphalt so pervasive if there are better options out there?" A lot of it comes down to cashflow. Cashflow is one of the biggest challenges in real estate development, since – it's a business where you invest a lot of money upfront and then earn it back over time afterwards.

Developers are often motivated by short-term incentives when choosing materials for construction projects. They need to manage immediate expenses and ensure the project is completed within budget.

...We need to stop planning project primarily by spreadsheets, where the dominating inputs are costs you can measure easily. There are factors that are not reflected in those calculations that not only affect the quality of the place you're creating, but also the financial burden that the community will have to bear for decades down the line.

Walk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places, and it explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk,) which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.

Both images below are at the same scale, and the yellow dashed line is a quarter-mile radius. On the left is a power center. As we all know, if you're at Best Buy and need to pick something up at Old Navy, there's no way you're walking from one store to another. Instead, you get in your car and drive as close as possible to the Old Navy front door. You'll even wait for a parking space to open up instead of driving to an open space just a few spaces away… not because you're lazy, but because it's such a terrible walking experience.

The image on the right is Rome. The circles are centered on the Piazza del Popolo (North is to the left) and the Green radius goes through the Vittorio Emanuele on the right. People regularly walk that far and then keep on walking without ever thinking of driving.

Recently, Berkeley has rediscovered an apartment building type that’s common in much of the world: the 8-story block on a small lot...While currently rare in the United States, this is a type of apartment building that’s popular in much of the world, especially in middle income countries.

...The ground floor of these buildings have small storefronts that take up most of the ground floor. The entrance for residents is small, with just a door or gate on the street. This type of building works very well in pedestrianized areas with narrow streets.

...Elsewhere in the world, these workhorse buildings are the unsung heroes of urban housing, providing the bulk of homes in many places.

The open web is much like emergent, unplanned cities — it happens at the scale of the individual, it allows for unexpected creativity, it gives agency to anyone (well, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge) to shape their own spaces. On the other hand, the platforms that now dominate much of the web experience are more evocative of Moses’s planned cities—they often occur at the scale of the corporation, and have rigid, predictable constraints for how individuals can behave and express themselves.

Industrial in construction, [the polikatoikias] were still aligned to a traditional street in densely packed urban neighborhoods, with differing building heights and lengths giving a haphazard, un-regimented impression.

The state contributed little or no cash to these buildings, but it did place limits on some aspects of their design. It ensured, for example, that any polikatoikia rising above six floors was set back in tiers from that floor upwards. This created a characteristic Athenian roof-scape, in which little ziggurats of penthouse-style flats, with broad wrap-around terraces, could be found topping many buildings, even in less wealthy areas.

The resulting variety of apartments within the same building ensured a good deal of social mixing. “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor. And the polikatoikias in the richest and the poorest areas were more or less the same building.”

The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society.

The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city.

Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Compared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings. For cities around the globe mired in crisis and seeking new models for the future, Tokyo's success at balancing between massive growth and local communal life poses a challenge: can we design other cities to emulate its best qualities?

Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets. Tokyo at its best offers a new vision for a human-scale urban ecosystem, where ordinary residents can shape their own environment in ways large and small, and communities take on a life of their own beyond government master planning and corporate profit-seeking. As Tokyoites ourselves, we uncover how five key features of Tokyo's cityscape - yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods - enable this 'emergent' urbanism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up.

Among real-estate developers, straight lines and right angles went out of fashion sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. If you look at a town or a residential neighborhood laid out since then, you are more likely to find sinuous, serpentine roads—whether or not the topography offers any excuse for such curves. Many of these roads go nowhere: they are loops that bring you back to where you started, or they are cul-de-sacs. Making it easy to find your way through the network of streets is obviously not a high priority. This is an interesting development in urban geography: having redesigned the city to accommodate the automobile, we now search for ways to discourage people from driving on the streets.

In cities across the world, industrial zones beside rivers and canals have become the focus of attention, with their unique vivacity associated with places where things are made.

...Because the area is designated as a semi-industrial zone, we were able to get away with such an enormous machine inside [the Starbucks Reserve Roastery].

Psychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:

• "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
• "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
• "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."

Local Code’s data-driven layout arranges drawings of 3,659 digitally tailored interventions for vacant public land in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Venice, Italy. The natures of these found parcels is as particular as the cities that house them — land under billboards in Los Angeles, ­dead-end alleys in San Francisco, city-owned vacant lots in New York City, and abandoned islands in the Venetian lagoon — but have in ­common an unrecognized potential as a social and ecological resource.

Listed in a Van Eaton Galleries auction recently was a mysterious document called “Paradise Pier Imagineering Project Scope” that profoundly called to me.

In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky documented the ways in which most cities were mostly built by improvisation, following no consistent formal design. Building was added to building, street to street, their forms adapting to different site conditions in the process of extension.

Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas 'renewal' projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space.

I thought I’d write a follow-up to my post a couple of weeks ago about Japanese urbanism.

...Briefly, I attributed the awesomeness of Japanese cities to:

• Zoning that tells you what you can’t build in an area, instead of what you can build, which allows most areas to have shops and restaurants
• Zoning that forces shops and restaurants to be smaller in more residential areas
• Policies to promote small, independent retail businesses over large ones
• Public safety
• Noiseproofing and noise ordinances
• Excellent trains
• Nice public spaces

That list was, of course, pretty reductionist. You could implement those same policies elsewhere in the world, and while you might get a really awesome city, it would still be very different from Tokyo.

...[So] I thought I’d talk about some of my takeaways from Emergent Tokyo and from Joe’s paper, and how these insights could be applied to improve other cities in the U.S. and beyond.

The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors.

As the city expanded, additional sectors would be added to the end of each band, so that the city would become ever longer, without growing wider.

I do not know what one should call the landscape of a long cultivated countryside, or the enchanting pattern of lights which shows at night time in a modern city seen from overhead. Are these not works of art? It is scarcely justifiable to say that these things have taken shape by chance. Each part of them has been made as it is by what seemed a deliberate act, and it need not necessarily be assumed to be a matter of chance that the results of many acts of many men over a considerably period of time should harmonize together aesthetically.

I don't want to talk here about the grand designs of the past – the sort of thing one finds in majestic cities, in palaces and temples; the sorts of layouts that brought a friend of mine to sum up his first impression of Washington D.C. by saying, "The place seems to be designed to be ruins."

Just as it seems that economic destinies are not exclusively determined by how easy it is to get from point a to point b in a city, as expressed by edge volume (where a-to-b is easier in low-edge cities, and harder in high-edge cities), it may be the case that hyperstimulation is less likely to occur in highly orthogonal cities...It also illustrates a point that, though it seems obvious enough, is worthy clarifying, on account of how easily it might otherwise be taken for high-value dogma — that what makes a city hyperstimulating is not necessarily what makes it optimally productive and growth-oriented.

• Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
• Unfinished = fertile
• Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
• A city’s waste should be on public display.
• Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
• Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
• Low rent = high life
• Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
• Shared public space is the crucible of community.
• A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.

Hecomi, as I call it, are cracks and fissures or broken off and damaged areas, created by natural forces, on man-made surfaces such as roads or walls. By looking only at their shape one can see that even hecomi, which have a bad image of being old and dirty, have various attractive characteristics such as surprising novelty, heartwarming charm and overwhelming power. This may be because the voice that arose right at the boundary between humans and nature was given a visible form. Also, they are reminiscent of shapes seen on maps or remind us of creatures. Sometimes one may feel a sense of familiarity towards them.

Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.

The terrain of cities was subdivided along the lines of distinct and discrete patterns of use, with very little opportunity for mixing (separation and concentration of functions). After all, the home environment should be just that…while places of work should be aggregated and serviced with their appropriate supporting functions.

Such plans were deemed efficient.

Reading Design is an online archive of critical writing about design. The idea is to embrace the whole of design, from architecture and urbanism to product, fashion, graphics and beyond. The texts featured here date from the nineteenth century right up to the present moment but each one contains something which remains relevant, surprising or interesting to us today.

In every skyscraper there is someone going mad.

New Public Sites walking tours explore the history, design and uses of public spaces. Through walking tours, maps and videos, Public Artist Graham Coreil-Allen pushes pedestrian agency, interprets aspects of the everyday and investigates the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” – traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.

Tactical urbanism includes low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighborhoods and city gathering places. Tactical urbanism is also commonly referred to as guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, city repair, or D.I.Y. urbanism.

The Street Plans Collaborative defines "tactical urbanism" as an approach to urban change that features the following five characteristics:

1. A deliberate, phased approach to instigating change;
2. The offering of local solutions for local planning challenges;
3. Short-term commitment and realistic expectations;
4. Low-risks, with a possibly high reward; and
5. The development of social capital between citizens and the building of organizational capacity between public-private institutions, non-profits, and their constituents.

There is a Japanese catchphrase, community suru, literally "making" or "doing" community. I will never forget the queasy feeling that came over me when I first heard that term, phrased as if community were a kind of event.

Hold an event, bring people together, get people who might otherwise never meet to interact. It's a wonderful thought. I have nothing against events per se. However, if they are not spontaneous and voluntary, they will not last. That is my objection to the keep-it-lively concept of community. The perception of community as event stems, I think, from a yearning for the festivals and rituals that once flourished in rural communities in Japan. But those events occurred precisely because a community existed, not the other way around.

Much twentieth-century urban planning proceeded on the principle: demolish all you can, grade it flat, and then build from scratch. The existing environment has been seen as standing in the way of the planner's will. This aggressive recipe has frequently proved disastrous, destroying many viable buildings as well as ways of life bedded into urban fabric. The replacements for these destroyed buildings have also, too often, proved worse: big projects suffer from overdetermined, fit-for-purpose form; when history moves on, as it always does, tightly defined buildings can soon become obsolete.

Here is the correct fastest algorithm for getting to your destination: Every time you are at an intersection, if there is a green light for going either North or East, and that is a useful direction for you to take (i.e. if you’re still South of destination and there’s a North light, or if you’re still West of your destination and there’s an East light), take it.

The thing about this algorithm is that it’s completely outside of Google Maps’s ability to give you this plan. It’s not just that it’s not a thing it considers, it’s not a thing that it can consider, because there’s too much variability to predict exactly when the lights are going to change on your journey, even if it had precise timing data. This is however no problem for following the algorithm, because it is adaptive - it takes into account the information that you have access to at the time of making the decision but do not have in advance.

Planning in advance is very useful, but it will always lack access to this sort of on the ground information, and you can often improve on purely up front plans by introducing an adaptive element to it like this.

Once you start pondering the idea of a collective trap, you see them everywhere. Tall, heavy cars such as SUVs are an example. Why does anyone drive such an inefficient, impractical vehicle in an urban environment? The answer, surely, is that they are worried about being hit by another tall, heavy car. 

You could broaden the argument to the car itself. People often drive when they could walk or cycle (or let their children walk or cycle) because they do not feel safe on the roads. But the main danger on the roads? All those people driving, many of whom are only driving because they do not feel safe.

It’s at times like these that the libertarian slumbering deep inside me splutters awake and warns that individual freedom is precious. True, true. I do not actually think either Instagram or driving should be illegal. But collective traps are real. There are times and places (near schools in particular) where almost everyone would be better off if nobody was allowed a smartphone or, for that matter, a car.

This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.

Aesthetic walks and drives from around the world

The biographer of Robert Moses, Robert A. Caro, refers to the bridges and underpasses of the famed New York State parkways. These bridges and underpasses are quite low, intentionally specified by Moses to allow only private cars to pass. All those who traveled by bus because they were poor or black or both were barred from the use and enjoyment of the parkland and its "public amenities" by the technical design of the bridges. Even at the time of Robert Moses, a political statement of the form "We don't want them blacks in our parks" would have been unacceptable in New York State. But a technological expression of the same prejudice appeared to be all right. Of course, to the public the intent of the design became evident only after it was executed, and then the bridges were there.

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils.

Walking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?

Textbooks on water-system engineering state that supply mains are generally installed on the north side of the street in the Northern Hemisphere and on the south side in the Southern Hemisphere, so that the sun will warm them. In both hemispheres they are supposed to be on the east side of north-south streets, on the premise that the afternoon sun is warmer than the morning sun.

American cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything.

Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usually written in automation-rich environments fitting into frameworks and other orchestrating code.

…But despite the availability of cars, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of European, human-scale cities, because ultimately cities are places humans must inhabit and understand. In the same way, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of hand-written codebases even in the presence of heavy programming tooling, because ultimately codebases are places humans must inhabit.

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.

If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.

What has emerged here is that although survivorship bias probably does contribute to that to some extent, it is not the main explanation: premodern buildings may on average have been a bit less beautiful than those that have survived, but they still seem to have been ugly far less often than recent buildings are.

The survivorship theory sought to explain the apparent rise of ugliness in terms of a bias in the sample of buildings we are observing. There is another kind of bias theory, which seeks to explain it in terms of a bias in the observer, saying for instance that every generation is disposed to find recent buildings uglier than older ones, and that this is why recent buildings seem so to us. This is a complex and interesting idea, which I am not going to assess on this occasion. Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us.

And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.

It is only in the present age that it has been asserted that 'architecture is not an art' or 'should not be an art': and that strenuous efforts are made to made a distinction between design and art. And nowadays we build cities of such a quality that no one likes living in them, everyone who can do so gets a motor car to escape from them. Because of the multitude of motor cars, escape is now denied us, the country is destroyed, and the cities become still less tolerable to live in.

All that is the consequence of contempt for art. Art is not a matter of giving people a little pleasure in their time off. It is in the long run a matter of holding together a civilization.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
Beneath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

Waste-disposal facilities of all kinds—landfills, incinerators, even transfer stations—are sure bets for generating the NIMBY response: not in my backyard. In its most cynical form, NIMBY is the attitude of citizens who acknowledge the need for a facility, somewhere, but who oppose a plan for building it simply because the selected site is too close to their own property. But opposition to landfills and many other kinds of development goes well beyond cynical NIMBY. Another catch phrase for this phenomenon is BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody. Or else it's NOPE: not on planet earth.

"See, what I've always liked about Los Angeles is that it's one of the least restrictive towns in the world. You can pretty much live any way you want to here. And part of that is because the place has no tradition and no history in that sense. It doesn't have any image of itself, which is exactly its loss and gain. That's why it's such a great place to do art and to build your ideas about culture. In New York, it's like an echo chamber: its overwhelming sense of itself, of its past and its present and its mission, becomes utterly restricting."

The question of gentrification is made complex by the fact that the urban qualities it produces—lively street life, profuse commerce, preservation and upgrading of old buildings—are highly desirable, the substrate of urbanity. The problem with gentrification is with its particulars and with its effects.

Gentrification suppresses reciprocity by its narrowed scripting of formal and social behavior, by turning neighborhoods into Disneylands or Colonial Williamsburgs, where residents become cast members and the rituals of everyday life become spectacle or food for consumption.

In residential neighborhoods some sewage-pumping stations are trompe l'oeil fantasies, dressed up to look like the split-level or colonial houses that surround them. If you look closely, it's not hard to spot these disguised pumphouses: the heavy-duty power connections, the big ventilating fans, and the diesel generator in the backyard are all tip-offs. Furthermore, the windows are often fakes, with sash and shutters adorning a blank wall.

You can sort urbanists by whether they were radicalized by Amsterdam or Tokyo.

In this episode we explore in two early schemes for mass housing, at Pessac and in Stuttgart. Among many other things, we talked about:

• Bourneville
• New Lanark
• Arnold circus
• Bruno taut’s horseshoe estate
• Pessac
• Henri Frugès
• The Weissenhofseidlung
• Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky
• Hannes Meyer’s essay "The New World"

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.

Though demolished some 30 years ago, fascination in Kowloon Walled City remains as great as ever, fired in part by its unusual history as a piece of China set in the heart of urban Hong Kong and by the many legends that forever swirled around this fascinating community. City of Darkness Revisited aims to question the myths and explore the reality behind the Walled City’s extraordinary development.

They hated both equally, in any case, and coupled them like ham and eggs, so that to this day housers and planners pop out the phrase as if it were one word, “highdensityandovercrowding.”

Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.

All living things contain two sites of resistance. These are cell walls and cell membranes. The cell wall is more purely exclusionary – a boundary; the membrane permits more fluid and solid exchange – a border.

Most pervasive in the modern city is the inert boundary established by highway traffic, cutting off parts of the city from each other. Working with resistance means, in urbanism, converting boundaries into borders.

Unlike the traditional neighborhood model, which evolved organically as a response to human needs, suburban sprawl is an idealized artificial system. It is not without a certain beauty: it is rational, consistent, and comprehensive. Its performance is largely predictable. It is an outgrowth of modern problem solving: a system for living. Unfortunately, this system is already showing itself to be unsustainable.

Think globally, act locally, but plan regionally.