An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Urban Culture, Space, Architecture, and Design
My title is inspired by an excellent New Year’s Eve 2012 piece posted on New Geography by Richey Piiparinen (also posted here) that questions the “livability” focus of much urban development over the last few years. More about that below. […]
Placemaking talk is everywhere these days. So too is “creative class” talk. Richard Florida—formulator of the creative class concept—combines them in a recent essay for Urban Land. Many people are on board with the notion that quality of place has […]
In a post at Better! Cities&Towns and also PlaceShakers and NewsMakers Howard Blackson succinctly summarizes what he considers the 5 basic elements of neighborhood planning, pitched as the “5 Cs”: 1. Complete: a mix of uses (allowing living, working, playing, lounging, eating, […]
It was an honor to participate in the recent Intercultural Place-Making Seminar sponsored by The Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities Programme and held at the Palazzo Badoer, Università IUAV di Venezia. The seminar’s central organizing question was how urban planning […]
One of my favorite anthropologists is the Norwegian Thomas Hylland Eriksen. His book Engaging Anthropology was a big hit in my senior capstone seminar on public anthropology. I recently came across his essay “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority […]
Or, help kill him? So asks Planetizen, in advertising an article by Robert Steuteville in Better! Cities and Towns. Steuteville’s argument is that gated communities like The Retreat at Twin Lakes create “a fortress mentality” replete with paranoia and suspicion […]
Yesterday’s Atlantic Wire listed MIT Urban Planner Eran Ben-Joseph’s column in The New York Times called “When a Parking Lot is so Much More” as a top Monday read. The essence of Ben-Joseph’s argument: The ubiquity of parking lots has…led […]
ANARCHETIQUETTE: The removal and preservation of wall writings on public buildings before they are covered up or the buildings themselves are demolished or renovated; efforts to conserve an intangible heritage that would otherwise be eliminated. Since at least the 1970s […]
This week the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation—widely known for creating iconic buildings to house its museums, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s classic spiraled ribbon on Fifth Avenue in New York City and Frank Gehry’s twisted curves in Bilbao, Spain—joined the “Pop-Up […]
In his deservedly well-reviewed book Triumph of the City the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser unambiguously opts for people as the key element that determines a city’s success. He argues that a place-centered approach to urban planning—that is, one informed by […]