President’s Letter: October 2024 – The Municipal Art Society of New York
Neuropolis: Our relationship with cities from Mumbai to Manhattan. As our cities change, they inspire a change in us: "A new generation of explorers, cyclists and psychogeographers are remapping urban landscapes through non-places. In this expanding urban maze, waymarks — as ever — are key to community cohesion ." Cities are described as "an... See more
Weidenfeld & Nicolson • You Are Here: A Brief Guide to the World
There’s one large-scale plan that I end up critiquing quite a bit in the book called the Giant Sea Wall. It’s a plan to create, really, a whole new city on reclaimed land in the bay, with these very large retention ponds that could be pumped low enough that the rivers and canals in the city could drain into them. The planners think they need... See more
Alissa Walker • New York Needs to Become a City That Floods Now and Then
The idea of resilience can easily be invoked to protect the status quo and foreclose more transformative change, but resilience can be more just. Jill Eisenhard from RHI describes how they talked about resilience with Red Hook youth way before Sandy hit. And resilience, for them, was both the strength, motivation, or confidence within each of them... See more
Alissa Walker • New York Needs to Become a City That Floods Now and Then
In this environment, the traditional virtues of infrastructure — permanence, scale, and linear efficiency — become strategic liabilities. A project designed to last a hundred years may now become obsolete in twenty.
Substack • Infrastructure After Permanence: From Monuments of Certainty….
Continuity, not permanence, becomes the new horizon of civilisation — the art of sustaining coherence across transformation.
The question facing every government, investor, and citizen is no longer how much we can build , but how well we can stay alive together in a world that refuses to stay still. This is the real politics of infrastructure now:
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