Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

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Leon Krier's lesson in architecture

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Tue, 12/29/2009 - 13:36, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 00:50

Review of The Architecture of Commun

Review of Radiant City

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 09/02/2009 - 16:14, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:51

There is a scene early in the 2006 mockumentary Radiant City that provides the key explanation to the morphology of suburban sprawl. Our favorite writer James Howard Kunstler sits on a bench in a community bike trail that is enclosed in two rows of chain link fence in order to, I presume, secure it from the high-capacity arterial road that runs alongside it. The experience is vaguely what it must have been like to patrol the Berlin Wall, had it been encircled by an expressway.

The rules for changing rules

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 19:12, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:27

Paul Romer presents his solution to the problem of underdevelopment in this TED video.

Stanford economist Paul Romer believes in the power of ideas. He first studied how to speed up the discovery and implementation of new technologies. But to address the big problems we'll face this century -- insecurity, harm to the environment, global poverty --  new technologies will not be enough. We must also speed up the discovery and implementation of new rules, of new ideas about how people interact.

Planning for nomads

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 02/02/2009 - 00:39, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:25

Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else. Even for a nation known for its exceptional mobility, the fact that people are not only moving in pursuit of employment opportunities but are looking to move simply because they hate the place they live in reveals a much deeper problem. Economic opportunity is no longer what keeps people moving, it is what keeps them immobilized. Given the same opportunity they would relocate to the kind of place where life is good.

Regional complexity and local community

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Tue, 01/06/2009 - 22:09, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:00

The housing crisis afflicting Britain has reached such an intolerable level that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is announcing what amounts to a nationalization of planning regulations (report via Planetizen). This comes on the heels of the mayor of Greater London being granted the power to override planning rules of boroughs in order solve the capital's even more outrageous housing situation, as recently as 2007.

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