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Victor Gruen’s The Heart of Our Cities

Ray Oldenburg • The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

The area that the individual perceives as belonging to the dwelling, the residential environment, can extend well beyond the actual dwelling.

Jan Gehl • Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space

What is singular about New York, and remains virtually incomprehensible to people who live in less rigidly organized parts of the country, is the minimal level of comfort and opportunity its citizens have come to accept.

Joan Didion • After Henry: Essays

Since tech platforms rarely address the enormity of the social changes they have caused, preferring to deemphasize their own power, it surprised me that he admitted Airbnb had an effect not just on how people travel, but on where they go, actively influencing the destination.

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

Dense Discovery / Issue 183

Dense Discovery densediscovery.com

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to the food

Michael Pollan • ‘Cooked’: A DIY Manifesto

Even prior to the pandemic, these institutions were shuttering, according to research. As Americans spend more time alone and practice individualized forms of leisure, like marathoning television series on streaming services and passively scrolling on social platforms, they aren’t gathering communally as often as they were in decades past — a shift... See more

Allie Volpe • If You Want to Belong, Find a Third Place

in April 2019, “There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit.” And so, every taxpaying Californian was asked, realizing it or not, to finance the protection of homes built in places where fire was sure to burn.

Rosecrans Baldwin • Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles

This book will add one more accusation to the pile: the design of online social spaces has contributed to the atrophy of everyday democratic skills. The diagnosis also bears remedies. More than other explanations of democratic erosion, this account suggests that the future of democracy can begin at the level of ordinary community, wherever we find