Sublime

In the early 1990s, a long-simmering urban planning movement finally found its legs. For thirty years, a small group of urban advocates had grown weary of merely expounding the virtues contained in Jacobs’s book and decided to get organized. In 1993, the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) had their first meeting. Its founders included the influential

Hayward and Swanstrom argue that when injustice is tied up with the physical spaces of cities and the policies that create them, it becomes “difficult to assign responsibility for it—and hence difficult to change.” That’s why the curb cut’s history—a successful “editing” of the built environment that arrived via mandate of federal law—is so impress

Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety. First, they give people—both residents and strangers—concrete reasons for using the sidewalks on which these enterprises face. Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to public use in th

The building of a public work shapes a city perhaps more permanently than any other action of government. Large-scale public works shape a city for generations. Some public works—most notably the great bridges and highways that open new areas to development and insure that these areas will be developed on the low-density pattern fostered by highway

The utopian city he envisioned would have two levels: an upper level designed for beauty and pedestrian life, and a level hidden below for canals, commerce, sanitation, and sewage.

To be able to move about easily and confidently, to be able to linger in cities and residential areas, to be able to take pleasure in spaces, buildings, and city life, and to be able to meet and get together with other people – informally or in more organized fashion – these are fundamental to good cities and good building projects today, as in the