Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

urban tissue

Defining a new traditional urbanism

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 21:55, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:16

Sometime last year this website attracted the attention of several members of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an organization sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation in order to support and renew traditions of construction. While this organization does great work to preserve the techniques of traditional building cultures, they have yet to define what the traditional urbanism of their name really implies. The importance of such a definition I believe to be primordial.

The Fundamentals of Urban Complexity

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 05/11/2009 - 10:00, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:02

This is part II in an ongoing series of excerpts of an article set to be published this summer in The International Journal of Architectural Research, tentatively titled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Click here for part I, The Journey to Emergence.

Slumdog Urbanist

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 02/23/2009 - 17:13, last updated Mon, 09/05/2011 - 21:47

A great article appeared in the NY Times about the setting for this year's multiple academy-award winning film Slumdog Millionaire, which I recommend as an instant classic of urban filmmaking, the post-shantytown Dharavi.

Decoding paradise - the emergent form of Mediterranean towns

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Sun, 12/21/2008 - 19:43, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:15

scarano4

Serifos in Greece

The collapse of rural cities

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 06/11/2008 - 18:31, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:19

The advent of low-cost motoring and extension of expressways through rural areas made possible a form of urbanisation that few people had foreseen. Le Corbusier had dreamed the automobile to allow the working man to live in the country and work in the city. The suburbs made that dream real, or at least as far as the suburbs were a pastiche of the country. What the automobile did to radically transform rural landscapes was make it possible for someone to live in the country and work a hundred kilometers elsewhere in the country.

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