Sublime

The problem, Kirk told Jacobs, was that nobody was following up on the work to see if the new projects were better than what they had replaced.

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

“Most people believe the alternative to cars is better transit—in truth, it’s better neighborhoods.” 71

absolute ruler. This spatial fact is perhaps inherent in the process of urban or architectural planning itself, a process that involves miniaturization and scale models upon which patron and planner gaze down, exactly as if they were in a helicopter.13 There is, after all, no other way of visually imagining what a large-scale construction project w

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 functi

The same is true in architecture: over-planned model cities rarely work as intended and are hard to love, whereas the best designs have built into them a capacity to adapt and evolve.