Sublime

Here it is necessary to take issue with a common belief about cities—the belief that uses of low status drive out uses of high status. This is not how cities behave, and the belief that it is (Fight Blight!) renders futile much energy aimed at attacking symptoms and ignoring causes. People or uses with more money at their command, or greater respec

The economy is never in equilibrium but is rather in a continual state of adaptive change.

These planners had said—the Regional Plan Association had been saying it since 1929 and, after the opening of Moses’ creations during the 1930’s, with increasing urgency—that the movement of people and goods in a great metropolitan region required a balanced transportation system, one in which the construction of mass rapid transit facilities kept

The large-scale demolitions of public housing complexes was both expensive and disruptive to the people living in them, but it provided a unique opportunity to learn what happens to crime when these complexes are demolished. In the case of Chicago, the housing authority demolished nearly 22,000 units of high-rise public housing and relocated affect

A few examples include: Greed is good. Maximizing pleasure from consumption is the goal. A billion acts of selfishness will lead to a prosperous society. The social duty of business is just to maximize its profits. There’s no such thing as society, only individuals—that was Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote. Markets are efficient; other institutions

Landscape architects are increasingly embracing desire lines from the outset, allowing desire lines to emerge in parks and campuses over a period of many months, and then paving the lines to make permanent walkways. The approach is certainly preferable to the more common alternative: Attempt to predict how people will navigate a landscape, render t

What’s really happening within each city is a massive exchange of information across social and economic networks of people and organizations, all taking place on a complex infrastructural landscape of buildings, roads, pipes, and wires. For the most part there is no maestro; the properties of cities emerge from countless interactions of millions o

by assumption, no one has an incentive to switch professions, just places.