Half as many people will not support half as many enterprises In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal wither away. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities densitydistancegeographybusinesseconomics
Non-architects In 1964, the historian Bernard Rudofsky curated a show at MoMA called Architecture Without Architects, celebrating the formal qualities of a range of traditional building practices drawn from around the world. Setting aside the endlessly troubled implications of the Western gaze on “primitive” cultures, the show had the very constructive impacts of encouraging formal diversity at a time when mainstream architecture had grown desperately, myopically monochromatic and of suggesting that “non-architects” were capable not only of making good judgments about their environments but of actually taking the lead in creating them. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan The Timeless Way of BuildingMost cities were mostly built by improvisationArchitecture Without Architects architecture