The spatial dimension of democracy Since the time of the Greeks, democracy has been understood to have a spatial dimension and so, by extension, an element of scale. Plato measured the polis, the unit of democratic citizenship, at five hundred citizens, an extremely tractable size for a community that seeks to express itself through direct engagement. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan democracypoliticscommunity
Self-appointed public characters The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character. A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function—although he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities community
Togetherness “Togetherness” is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. “Togetherness,” apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart. When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, the people of the place must enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors. They must settle for some form of “togetherness,” in which more is shared with one another than in the life of the sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results. City residential planning that depends, for contact among neighbors, on personal sharing of this sort, and that cultivates it, often does work well socially, if rather narrowly, for self-selected upper-middle-class people. It solves easy problems for an easy kind of population. So far as I have been able to discover, it fails to work, however, even on its own terms, with any other kind of population. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Doing community classcommunity
NIMBY, BANANA, NOPE 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. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape urbanismcommunitytrash
The secret life of sculpture The sculptures are arranged in informal groupings, carefully placed to catch the natural light that brings them to life, so that, when we enter the room, it seems we have interrupted an ongoing conversation among them. Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture objectscommunity
Two Cycles A Book by Toshiharu Naka livingculture.lixil.com Show image 0 Show image 1 Show image 2 Show image 3 Gorgeous artwork by Minori Asada. Among the treesSmall economiesAn extremely closed structureEcological cyclesDoing community+2 More Turn them into cycles architectureurbanismcyclescommunity
Soft City A Book by David Sim islandpress.org Soft city principlesSoft is something to do with... 125 Best Architecture BooksNew-urbanist projects urbanismcommunitycities
Field Notes on Science and Nature A Book by Michael R. Canfield www.hup.harvard.edu An endless living worldWhy Sketch?Letters to the FutureOne and a Half Cheers for List-KeepingLinking Researchers Across Generations+8 More The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz
An endless living world If there is a heaven, and I am allowed entrance, I will ask for no more than an endless living world to walk through and explore. learningnaturereligionwalking
Why Sketch? An Essay by Jenny Keller What you have observed closelyA single imageParallel refinementColor reproductionThe negative spaces+4 More Conversational drawingThe Beauty of the Overlooked
Letters to the Future An Essay by John D. Perrine & James L. Patton The lapse of many yearsThe Grinnell SystemJim's systemJohn's systemRecord them all+3 More
One and a Half Cheers for List-Keeping An Essay by Kenn Kaufman I don't need that birdList-chasingThe maximization method
Linking Researchers Across Generations An Essay by Anna K. Behrensmeyer Future valueTime capsulesTools of the digital ageFive basic rulesBonewalks+1 More
Why Keep a Field Notebook? An Essay by Erick Greene Pick one thingLab notebooksHybrid journalsA fertile incubatorBest practices
The Spoken and the Unspoken An Essay by Karen L. Kramer What is unspokenResearch questionsQuantitative data collectionAnthropological rapportScan samples, focal follows+4 More The observer effect
Note-Taking for Pencilophobes An Essay by Piotr Naskrecki MantisAn extension of my brainRecordingsThe era of paper
The Evolution and Fate of Botanical Field Books An Essay by James L. Reveal To serve as a reminderSterile creaturesFurther and further away
The Pleasure of Observing An Essay by George B. Schaller AbbreviationBeyond dry factsA study should persistPrecious intangible valuesIndependent fragments of existence+1 More
In the Eye of the Beholder An Essay by Jonathan Kingdon Haven't you noticed?Wordless questioningOutlinesAgents of thought and experiment
Untangling the Bank An Essay by Bernd Heinrich Specific aimsMore than a witnessPeculiaritiesSecrecyIf it wasn't written down+1 More
A Reflection of the Truth An Essay by Roger Kitching The need to recordMental infrastructureScientific writingA three-layered process of documentationIncidental details+1 More