Category Archives: Announcement

As the idea of an emergent urbanism has become more popular, I’m receiving more and more emails asking me to look over some link or another and provide an opinion of the content. As I have unfortunately limited time, I cannot answer many of these requests. This led me to the realization that this little website needs to take a new, bold step into becoming something more than a blog/lesson, into an experiment in a new type of media.

When Le Corbusier set out to transform the world in his image, he did so by publishing his own magazines and books so that he would capture the imagination of humanity with all the power of the new forms of mass media, something that the traditionalist architects did not see any value in. It was his power to communicate farther and with more voice than any other that made him a legend. Despite all of our technological progress, we still experience the same form of mass media that Le Corbusier pioneered, and with mass media has come naturally the process of mass planning and mass architecture.

If there is to be a revolution towards a rediscovery of the more natural, more individual and more emergent forms of urbanism, there must also be a revolution in the media of urbanism. What is needed is not simply a change in form but a change in process all-around. The beginning of this change is a new way to communicate.

As social media networks have developed over the last few years (and it has taken very few years for them to stake their place alongside traditional mass media) we have rapidly accustomed ourselves to reading about only those things we find most relevant to our own perspective on the world, yet the information that is most relevant is spread out over myriad blogs, social feeds, and search engines. Those portals that do set out to provide news in urbanism rely on antiquated centralized editorial review processes to tell us what we should be interested in, in the same way Le Corbusier edited his magazine.

It is with these concerns in mind that I set out to design the Emergent Urbanism Network, a pioneering social media portal that aims to deliver to you the knowledge you need to advance your own personal growth as well as contribute to the growth of your peers. It is a portal that you create and you structure, in combination with every other member, into a publication that is infinitely scalable. It is an emergent form of media advocating for an emergent city.

If you are reading this, it means that you have become urgently interested in the subject of emergent urbanism. You may be a planner, an architect, a computer scientist, a consultant, an urbanist, an economist, a journalist, or anything else. Regardless of your title, your depth of interest is what matters most. Your contribution in the beginning of this new venture is critical, as it is the early structure you provide to the network that will shape its future. I need you to connect immediately and start telling us all about the issues and events you feel are related to urban complexity and emergence. You will help each other and you will help me as I continue to develop the technology to create the most powerful urban portal on the Internet.

Thank you all for your curiosity and your contributions. I’ll see you on the other side.