You Can Take It With You
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You Can Take It With You
Just watch people hurrying busily through the streets. They seem preoccupied, look neither left nor right, but have their eyes fixed on the ground like dogs. They rush straight ahead, but always without looking where they are going, for they are mechanically covering a well-known route, mapped out in advance. It is exactly the same in all the great
... See moreOne of the basic problems with Non-Place is that it’s contagious. When you start introducing Non-Places into a city design, you tend to add more and more Non-Places to try to fix the problems caused by the original Non-Places. If you have two Places next to each other, like an apartment building and a store, then you can easily walk from the apartm... See more
Place and Non-Place
the ability of municipalities to establish rules on land use through zoning is now a settled legal matter. In 1926 the US Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid, OH v. Ambler Realty Company settled the legal power of municipal governments to regulate the use of land. This case unfortunately also set the stage for the development of single-use zoni
... See moreJohn MacDonald • Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning
This is not a dumb gift of density. Jamming a mass of people into a chosen place will not allow you to re-create what other groups of people have achieved elsewhere, as the Soviet Union found out again and again. Cities are not interchangeable. What each offers is a specific gift of the ecosystems of people and practice it has nurtured. Once deep c
... See moreEzra Klein • Abundance
The mind-numbing repetition of chain stores, massive gas stations, self-storage facilities, and fast food joints has me and my husband nearly ready to take the longer but more scenic routes from now on. We are at a loss to understand the seemingly insatiable desire to develop every possible parcel of land along the highway and stuff it with the sam... See more
What Ever Happened to Beauty?
That all urban development has been locked into path dependency on an economic concern now millennia out-of-date is surely a cause of unimaginable waste and inefficiency.