Sublime

MANHATTAN AS MECCA If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represen

And here we come to the third kind of city neighborhood that is useful for self-government: the district. This, I think, is where we are typically most weak and fail most disastrously. We have plenty of city districts in name. We have few that function. The chief function of a successful district is to mediate between the indispensable, but inheren

In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.

people “mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity.”

efficiency.

cities typically must develop mechanisms that discourage and control antisocial behavior and free riding, which include the development of law and justice systems as well as policing.

Regard for power implies disregard for those without power as is demonstrated by what happened after Moses shifted the route of the Northern State Parkway away from Otto Kahn’s golf course.

The model is not dynamic and does not reflect the innovation characteristic of modern cities.

any freedoms (in the sense of choices) urbanites may gain in social interactions in larger cities will be lost in terms of available physical space.