Place and Non-Place

Over the years, I have written a lot about commercial (and domestic) spaces becoming more “logistical.” The degraded customer experience may be worthwhile from a cost-benefit perspective—and we can at least hope to recoup our losses in other domains, such as convenience—but the plight of physical space is real. The less pleasant it is to spend time... See more

Many such experiments, both historical and contemporary, get this balance not just wrong, but wildly wrong. They make the mistake of being about missions first, and placemaking second. That’s a suitable approach for a conference, corporation, religion, or a political movement, but not for a place qua place. Even a virtual place that exists only as ... See more

Desire Infrastructure

I'm playing on the term "desire paths" here, the paths that show up where people actually want to walk, not just where the planners of sidewalks and roads want them to walk.

If the only kinds of city neighborhoods that demonstrate useful functions in real-life self-government are the city as a whole, streets, and districts, then effective neighborhood physical planning for cities should aim at these purposes: First, to foster lively and interesting streets. Second, to make the fabric of these streets as continuous a ne

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I think a large part of why we’re so unhappy with our digital spaces is that the people designing them don’t really see themselves as urban planners. It’s a metaphor that occasionally floats around without much acknowledgment that it has altogether ceased to be a metaphor .

If designers, product managers and engineers are really digital urban planne... See more

When we ponder the layout of ancient cities, we must acknowledge that they are the by-product of thousands of years of human tinkering. People came together in villages and tried different living arrangements. What worked, they copied and expanded. What didn’t work, they discarded. That is, if those experiments hadn’t already killed or disbanded th

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