Creating high density of not only people, but ideas and energy = serendipity and aliveness. Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit—indeed, to encourage—the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life... See more

The tendency all too often is to see urban form as a finite thing, a closed thing, a complicated object. I want to stress what we know instead to be the case — that a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never complete, never at rest. Thousands of witting and unwitting acts every day alter its lines in ways that are perceptible only over a

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