Sublime

The physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute made a remarkable discovery about cities.

Which we have plenty of here in Seattle. Although many of the Bullitt Center’s technologies are currently too expensive for widespread use (which is why it remains one of the world’s greenest buildings seven years after it opened), we can still make homes and offices more efficient at a low cost.

Looking at city neighborhoods as organs of self-government, I can see evidence that only three kinds of neighborhoods are useful: (1) the city as a whole; (2) street neighborhoods; (and 3) districts of large, subcity size, composed of 100,000 people or more in the case of the largest cities. Each of these kinds of neighborhoods has different

The arguments in favor of the park route were clear. By making only a gentle alteration in the road’s route—swinging it just two blocks (one block in some places) to the south, 1,530 apartments would be saved at no cost to anyone: the road would not be made longer, its curves would not be made sharper—its efficiency as a traffic-moving device would

US Environmental Protection Agency,2 US Department of Housing and Urban Development,3 National Association of Realtors,4 Smart Growth America,5 Reconnecting America,6 Center for Neighborhood Technology,7 Center for Transit-Oriented Development,8

Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far