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Urban Planning & the Design of Communities

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  • 21. Four-Story Limit

    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.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​In every skyscraper​​
    2. ​​It begins with a trip down the stairs​​
    3. ​​Low wooden silhouettes​​
    4. ​​Skyscrapers are frowned upon​​
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • home
  • When history moves on

    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.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • urbanism
  • Such an enormous machine

    132-49163.jpg

    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].

    Kengo Kuma, My Life as an Architect in Tokyo
    www.starbucksreserve.com
    • industry
    • urbanism
  • The flash of a neon light

    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

    Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel, The Sound Of Silence
    • streets
    • urbanism
    • weather
  • Most cities were mostly built by improvisation

    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.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​I am here​​
    2. ​​Non-architects​​
    • urbanism
  • The Help-Yourself City

    Image from 99percentinvisible.org on 2020-09-12 at 11.52.53 AM.jpeg

    Astoria Scum River Bridge. Photo by Jason Eppink.

    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.

    Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt, 99% Invisible
    99percentinvisible.org
    1. ​​A collective right to the city​​
    2. ​​Tactical urbanism​​
    • urbanism
  • The linear city

    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.

    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​Snowpiercer​​
    2. ​​109. Long Thin House​​
    3. ​​Ideas for linear cities​​
    • urbanism
    • cities
  • The question of gentrification

    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.

    Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan
    • gentrification
    • urbanism
  • Tactical urbanism

    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.
    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​The Help-Yourself City​​
    • urbanism
  • Doing community

    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.

    Toshiharu Naka, Two Cycles
    1. ​​Togetherness​​
    • connection
    • urbanism
  • highdensityandovercrowding

    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.”

    Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
    • density
    • urbanism
  • Such plans were deemed efficient

    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.

    Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking
    1. ​​Same name in the same basket​​
    • urbanism
  • A World Where Things Only Almost Meet

    Image from www.bldgblog.com on 2020-03-01 at 10.48.11 PM.jpeg

    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.

    Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
    www.bldgblog.com
    1. ​​How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths​​
    • urbanism
    • geometry
    • dystopia
  • Like the lines of a hand

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

    Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
    • urbanism
    • history

    Cities & Memory 3

  • 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
    • urbanism
    • community
    • trash
  • In every skyscraper

    In every skyscraper there is someone going mad.

    Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
    1. ​​21. Four-Story Limit​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • madness

    Cities & Signs 2

  • Putting the streets to use

    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.

    Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City
    1. ​​Burglary's White Whale​​
    • transportation
    • urbanism
    • crime

    Referring to Los Angeles.

  • All the things we want to do

    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.

    Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City
    1. ​​Rage rooms​​
    • urbanism
    • life
  • The City of Light

    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.

    Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City
    • urbanism
  • Designed to be ruins

    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."

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    1. ​​To build a folly​​
    2. ​​Wittgenstein's Mistress​​
    • urbanism
  • Holding together a civilization

    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.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • architecture
    • art
    • urbanism
  • Deliberate acts

    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.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    • evolution
    • urbanism
  • Walls and membranes

    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.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • urbanism
  • Fabric

    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.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • connection
    • urbanism
    • patterns
  • Warmed by the afternoon sun

    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.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • details
    • urbanism
    • engineering
    • heat
  • Trompe l'oeil fantasies

    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.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • urbanism
    • infrastructure
  • Roads to nowhere

    IMG_3420.jpeg

    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.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • urbanism
    • transportation
    • geography
    • cities
  • Dead cities

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

    Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • understanding
  • Bridges as walls

    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.

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • politics
    • class
    • race
    • discrimination
    • urbanism
  • NYLA

    "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."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • cities
    • history
    • urbanism
  • A system for living

    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.

    Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation
    • urbanism
  • Globally, locally, regionally

    Think globally, act locally, but plan regionally.

    Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation
    • urbanism
  • The Timeless Way of Building

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.patternlanguage.com
    1. ​​Mind of no mind​​
    2. ​​The quality without a name​​
    3. ​​An objective matter​​
    4. ​​Bitterness​​
    5. ​​The most precious thing we ever have​​
    1. ​​Some emptiness in us​​
    2. ​​Deliberate acts​​
    3. ​​No kind​​
    4. ​​patternsof.design​​
    5. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    6. ​​Non-architects​​
    7. ​​The Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris Andrews​​
    8. ​​The usages of life​​
    • architecture
    • making
    • building
    • urbanism
    • beauty
    • construction
    • zen
  • A Pattern Language

    A Book by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Its place in the web of nature​​
    2. ​​9. Scattered Work​​
    3. ​​21. Four-Story Limit​​
    4. ​​51. Green Streets​​
    5. ​​53. Main Gateways​​
    1. ​​Deliberate acts​​
    2. ​​patternsof.design​​
    3. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    4. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    5. ​​The design systems between us​​
    6. ​​Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • life
    • construction
  • 20 Minutes in Manhattan

    A Book by Michael Sorkin
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​It begins with a trip down the stairs​​
    2. ​​Thoughts on stairs​​
    3. ​​They are something that has been buried​​
    4. ​​(an architectural stem cell that might transform itself into any organ for living)​​
    5. ​​The grid and its difficulties​​
    1. ​​The Mezzanine​​
    2. ​​Psychogeography​​
    3. ​​Tilted Arc​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • cities
    • home
    • walking

    Easily one of the most important books I've come across on issues of our urban environment. Could have been titled A Brief History of the City for its density of ideas.

  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities

    A Book by Jane Jacobs
    www.amazon.com
    1. ​​Dead cities​​
    2. ​​The dishonest mask of pretended order​​
    3. ​​The plan must anticipate all that is needed​​
    4. ​​The city's most vital organs​​
    5. ​​Eyes on the street​​
    1. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    • urbanism
    • cities
  • Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape

    A Book by Brian Hayes
    industrial-landscape.com
    1. ​​Savage, hostile, and cruel​​
    2. ​​Nature undisturbed​​
    3. ​​The raw materials of society​​
    4. ​​The dragline​​
    5. ​​Dark satanic steel​​
    1. ​​The Factory Photographs​​
    • infrastructure
    • technology
    • urbanism
    • industry
    • networks
  • A City Is Not a Tree

    An Essay by Christopher Alexander
    www.patternlanguage.com
    1. ​​Strands of life​​
    2. ​​Impending destruction​​
    3. ​​The right overlap​​
    4. ​​The difficulty of designing complexity​​
    5. ​​Political chains of influence​​
    1. ​​Trees and graphs​​
    2. ​​The dishonest mask of pretended order​​
    3. ​​The problem with trees​​
    4. ​​Both practical and aesthetic concerns​​
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • design
    • architecture
    • math
  • The Image of the City

    A Book by Kevin Lynch
    mitpress.mit.edu
    1. ​​To become completely lost​​
    2. ​​Apparency​​
    3. ​​On the edge of something else​​
    4. ​​Nothing there, after all​​
    5. ​​Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks​​
    1. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    2. ​​Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness​​
    3. ​​Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities​​
    • urbanism
    • place
    • cities
  • The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Two generating systems​​
    2. ​​Two types of building production​​
    3. ​​System A​​
    4. ​​System B​​
    5. ​​This has harmed modern society greatly​​
    1. ​​What the prototype tells you​​
    2. ​​On the "Building" of Software and Websites​​
    3. ​​Back to the Drawing Board​​
    4. ​​Reading the landscape​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • beauty
    • construction

    A struggle between two world-systems.

  • Two Cycles

    A Book by Toshiharu Naka
    livingculture.lixil.com
    Positioning Architecture Within Two Cycles
    The Fusion of the Two Cycles
    Coexisting With Nature — An Ecological Cycle
    Small Economies — A Social Cycle
    Positioning Architecture Within Two Cycles

    Gorgeous artwork by Minori Asada.

    1. ​​Among the trees​​
    2. ​​Small economies​​
    3. ​​An extremely closed structure​​
    4. ​​Ecological cycles​​
    5. ​​Doing community​​
    1. ​​Turn them into cycles​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • cycles
    • community
  • Soft City

    A Book by David Sim
    islandpress.org
    1. ​​Soft city principles​​
    2. ​​Soft is something to do with...​​
    1. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    2. ​​New-urbanist projects​​
    • urbanism
    • community
    • cities

    Building Density for Everyday Life

  • Invisible Cities

    A Book by Italo Calvino
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​An evening identical to this​​
    2. ​​Already memories​​
    3. ​​Like the lines of a hand​​
    4. ​​The eye does not see​​
    5. ​​In every skyscraper​​
    1. ​​Burglary's White Whale​​
    2. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    • urbanism
  • Design of Cities

    A Book by Edmund Bacon
    • urbanism
    • architecture
    • cities
  • The Nature of Order

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.natureoforder.com
    1. ​​Levels of Scale​​
    2. ​​Strong Centers​​
    3. ​​Boundaries​​
    4. ​​Alternating Repetition​​
    5. ​​Positive Space​​
    1. ​​Strength from both mass and form​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • goodness
    • beauty
  • A Burglar's Guide to the City

    A Book by Geoff Manaugh
    burglarsguide.com
    1. ​​To commune with the space​​
    2. ​​Every building is infinite​​
    3. ​​Putting the streets to use​​
    4. ​​Topology by other means​​
    5. ​​Burglary's White Whale​​
    1. ​​Picking locks with audio technology​​
    2. ​​The axis of movement​​
    3. ​​Learning to walk through walls​​
    • architecture
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • crime
    • theft
  • Suburban Nation

    A Book by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​A system for living​​
    2. ​​The five components of sprawl​​
    3. ​​Subdivisions​​
    4. ​​An unmade omelet​​
    5. ​​Beauty and function​​
    1. ​​The quality of the day​​
    2. ​​Drawing pictures of cities​​
    • urbanism
    • cities
  • How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

    A Documentary by Norman Foster
    www.imdb.com

    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.

    1. ​​Beijing airport ceiling​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
  • Against the survival of the prettiest

    An Essay by Samuel Hughes
    www.worksinprogress.co

    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.

    • urbanism
    • architecture
    • beauty
  • Scales of cities, scales of software

    An Article by Linus the Sephist
    linus.coffee

    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.

    • urbanism
    • software
    • scale
    • industry
  • Situationist Theses on Traffic

    An Essay by Guy Debord
    www.cddc.vt.edu
    1. ​​Two cars per family​​
    2. ​​To form an integrated human milieu​​
    3. ​​A matter of opposing the automobile​​
    • urbanism
  • A small store

    A Gallery by Kyeoung Me Lee
    www.leemk.com
    togimyum-summer.jpeg
    1-goryea.jpeg
    togimyum-summer.jpeg
    1. ​​Morioka Shoten​​
    • urbanism
    • whimsy
    • drawing
    • art

    Drawings of small convenience stores from around Korea. Via kottke.org via Colossal.

  • Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets

    An Article by Dan Hill & Brian Eno
    medium.com
    • 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.
    • collections
    • urbanism
    • streets
    • cities
    • waste
    • gardens
  • Walk Appeal

    An Article by Steve Mouzon
    originalgreen.org
    Image from originalgreen.org on 2021-08-24 at 7.39.48 PM.jpeg

    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.

    • urbanism
    • walking
  • Drawing pictures of cities

    An Article by Noah Smith
    noahpinion.substack.com
    Image from noahpinion.substack.com on 2021-07-24 at 1.33.54 PM.jpeg

    This is a famous picture by the artist Imperial Boy (帝国少年), who works in the anime industry. I sometimes claim that the entire genre of solarpunk is simply a riff on this picture.

    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
    1. ​​251. Different Chairs​​
    2. ​​Suburban Nation​​
    3. ​​Towers in the Village​​
    • urbanism
    • patterns
    • streets
  • Towers in the Village

    An Essay by Alfred Twu
    alfredtwu.medium.com
    Image from alfredtwu.medium.com on 2021-07-24 at 1.46.22 PM.jpeg

    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.

    1. ​​Soft city principles​​
    2. ​​Drawing pictures of cities​​
    • urbanism
    • cities
  • Human-scale digital spaces

    An Article by Alexis Lloyd
    medium.com
    Image from medium.com on 2020-08-03 at 3.50.25 PM.jpeg

    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.

    • www
    • urbanism
  • Semi-detached houses, 2019

    A Gallery
    www.pixelprojekt-ruhrgebiet.de
    Image from www.pixelprojekt-ruhrgebiet.de on 2021-05-10 at 3.40.02 PM.jpeg
    Image from www.pixelprojekt-ruhrgebiet.de on 2021-05-10 at 3.40.12 PM.jpeg
    Image from www.pixelprojekt-ruhrgebiet.de on 2021-05-10 at 3.40.02 PM.jpeg

    Images by Wolfgang Fröhling. Linked via kottke.org.

    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.

    • ownership
    • urbanism
    • repair
  • Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org

    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.

    1. ​​The Image of the City​​
    • urbanism
    • cities
    • software
    • understanding
  • A Need to Walk

    An Essay by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com

    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?

    • walking
    • thinking
    • urbanism
    • discovery
  • Off the Grid...and Back Again?

    An Article by Geoff Boeing
    geoffboeing.com
    Image from geoffboeing.com on 2020-11-02 at 10.51.56 AM.png
    Image from geoffboeing.com on 2020-11-02 at 10.52.07 AM.png
    Image from geoffboeing.com on 2020-11-02 at 10.51.56 AM.png

    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.

    • grids
    • streets
    • urbanism
    • suburbia
  • The 99% Invisible City

    A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt
    99percentinvisible.org
    • urbanism
    • cities
    • design
    • architecture
    • details
  • Psychogeography

    A Definition by Guy Debord
    en.wikipedia.org

    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."
    1. ​​Who the fuck is Guy Debord?​​
    2. ​​20 Minutes in Manhattan​​
    3. ​​The drift​​
    4. ​​Raindrops leaving an erratic trail​​
    • walking
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • play
    • exploration
  • New Public Sites

    A Place by Graham Coreil-Allen
    newpublicsites.org

    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.

    1. ​​Names vs. The Nothing​​
    • urbanism
    • walking
  • Local Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design & The Nature of Cities

    A Book by Nicholas de Monchaux
    localco.de

    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.

    1. ​​Names vs. The Nothing​​
    2. ​​Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42º N Latitude​​
    • cities
    • urbanism
  • New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future

    A Book by Tigran Haas
    books.google.com
    1. ​​New-urbanist projects​​
    • urbanism
    • cities
    • architecture
  • Reading Design

    A Website
    www.readingdesign.org

    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.

    1. ​​What this site is​​
    • design
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • graphics
    • fashion
  • All the buildings in New York (that I've drawn so far)

    A Blog by James Gulliver Hancock
    allthebuildingsinnewyork.com
    Image from allthebuildingsinnewyork.com on 2020-08-12 at 9.38.32 AM.jpeg
    • drawing
    • urbanism
    • cities

See also:
  1. cities
  2. architecture
  3. walking
  4. beauty
  5. streets
  6. community
  7. design
  8. construction
  9. industry
  10. details
  11. infrastructure
  12. transportation
  13. understanding
  14. connection
  15. patterns
  16. art
  17. history
  18. life
  19. drawing
  20. home
  21. crime
  22. software
  23. engineering
  24. heat
  25. geography
  26. trash
  27. geometry
  28. dystopia
  29. politics
  30. class
  31. race
  32. discrimination
  33. evolution
  34. madness
  35. math
  36. technology
  37. networks
  38. place
  39. goodness
  40. making
  41. building
  42. zen
  43. cycles
  44. www
  45. graphics
  46. fashion
  47. theft
  48. play
  49. exploration
  50. density
  51. gentrification
  52. grids
  53. suburbia
  54. thinking
  55. discovery
  56. ownership
  57. repair
  58. collections
  59. waste
  60. gardens
  61. whimsy
  62. weather
  63. scale
  1. Christopher Alexander
  2. Brian Hayes
  3. Geoff Manaugh
  4. Jane Jacobs
  5. Italo Calvino
  6. Richard Sennett
  7. Andres Duany
  8. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
  9. Jeff Speck
  10. Ursula M. Franklin
  11. Toshiharu Naka
  12. David Pye
  13. Murray Silverstein
  14. Sara Ishikawa
  15. Michael Sorkin
  16. Guy Debord
  17. Roman Mars
  18. Kurt Kohlstedt
  19. Lawrence Wechler
  20. Robert Irwin
  21. Edmund Bacon
  22. Tigran Haas
  23. David Sim
  24. Kevin Lynch
  25. Alexis Lloyd
  26. James Gulliver Hancock
  27. Peter G. Rowe
  28. Graham Coreil-Allen
  29. Nicholas de Monchaux
  30. Norman Foster
  31. Geoff Boeing
  32. Craig Mod
  33. Matt Webb
  34. Noah Smith
  35. Alfred Twu
  36. Steve Mouzon
  37. Dan Hill
  38. Brian Eno
  39. Kyeoung Me Lee
  40. Paul Simon
  41. Art Garfunkel
  42. Kengo Kuma
  43. Linus the Sephist
  44. Samuel Hughes