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Nestled in the heart of a bustling city is Unity Avenue, a vibrant street teeming with life. It's early morning, and the sunlight washes unevenly over a diverse mixture of new and old buildings ↕, some graffiti-sprayed and worn out by the ravages of time.

Unity Avenue: An illustrative summary of Jane Jacobs' work

During this formative time, she developed the roots of what one historian has called her “ecosocial” interpretation of the built environment, which considered architecture and the built environment to be an extension and manifestation of human ecology.5 This preference for the social led her to elevate Buckminster Fuller’s ecological utopianism ove... See more

Aggregate – Black Spaces Matter

Because she saw that older, shorter buildings were cheaper, she incorrectly believed that restricting heights and preserving old neighborhoods would ensure affordability. That’s not how supply and demand work. When the demand for a city rises, prices will rise unless more homes are built. When cities restrict new construction, they become more expe... See more

Edward Glaeser • Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

Eichhorn responds to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's 1970s concept of "cultural capital": the fluency in forms of high culture that could bestow social status and help members of elite classes to identify one another.

Cultural capital is knowing that cashmere is a more aspirational fabric than cotton or that a Jackson Pollock painting is much mor

“‘Disorder’ as the domination of public space for private purposes”

Charles Fain Lehman

Ezra Klein Podcast

The Great Diminishment has several causes. (The internet, social media, apathy, etc., all play a role. I’ve written more about how “everyone is numbing out.”) But a big cause is what I’ll call the “venture capitalization” of culture, where as much cost is squeezed out of every nook and cranny as possible, while prices remain the same or higher. You... See more

Catherine Shannon • The Great Diminishment

Reality TV, for example, is a manifestation of legacy institutions trying to capture the vitality of the Down lifestyles in faux narratives that emulate non-elites in everyday situations. Music genres each have their own up-versus-down positioning—just consider your mental images of the audience for rap, classical, country, jazz, etc. (But genres c

Ted Gioia • 15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict

capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.

Mark Fisher • Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?

The bottle service club today pitches Goffman’s “action” to the world’s new elite; it encourages the rich to flaunt their riches, to display wealth for display’s sake. Bottle service clubs are predicated on conspicuous consumption, a term coined, in 1899, by Thorstein Veblen, the quirky Norwegian American economist.