The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life

The success of Lübeck demonstrates important tools for creating thriving cities that apply to this day. Even in the Digital Age, businesspeople like to get together and gossip, trade, compete, and collaborate.

New Haven’s efforts to replace old neighborhoods with brutally modern architecture received national attention, and won many design awards, but by the late 1960s they had largely failed because they concentrated poverty, isolated residents

From the beginning the balance between civilization and nature has been essential to meeting both our spiritual and practical needs.

When the various individual agents in a system interact, they begin to self-organize into something larger, a community whose collective behavior allows it to function cohesively.

Modern cities operate under an economic theory that is less than 300 years old, and our theory of evolution is less than 150, so we don’t yet fully understand their implications. We have not developed an overarching meh to energize our cities, to permeate them with a worldview that aligns our economic, technological, and social advances with the we

The goal of this book is to knit these threads—our technical and social potential and the generative power of nature—back together, toward a higher purpose for cities.

To a volatile world of competing cities, Prince Henry the Lion offers a particularly salient message. He expanded his realm by widely disseminating free copies of his rules for ordering a diverse city. The best ideas for city planning and governance won, providing the tempering system that gave rise to a powerful network.

“This is the earliest complex society in the world. If you want to understand the roots of the urban revolution, you have to look at the Ubaid.”

The fourth quality of a well-tempered city is community—social networks made of well-tempered people.