Sublime
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Stewart Brand • Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
"You are going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city. Thinking about all the things that New York City has—or the next city has—is a lot less important than thinking about the things within the five blocks where you live.
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Wherever there are people – in buildings, in neighborhoods, in city centers, in recreational areas, and so on – it is generally true that people and human activities attract other people. People are attracted to other people. They gather with and move about with others and seek to place themselves near others. New activities begin in the vicinity
... See moreJan Gehl • Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space
Urban explorers use the dérive to map the emotive force field of the city, and the way architecture and topography combine to create its 'psychogeographical contours'. Robert Macfarlane, a masterful writer-walker of the countryside, offers this summary of the practice: 'Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map,
... See moreLauren Elkin • Flaneuse
The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his
... See moreJessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
Popular zones for staying are found along the facades in a space or in the transitional zone between one space and the next, where it is possible to view both spaces at the same time. In a study of the preferred areas for stays in Dutch recreational areas, the sociologist Derk de Jonge mentions a characteristic edge effect [25]. The edges of the
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