Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

zoning

The challenge of dense sprawl

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 10/22/2008 - 01:11, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 00:59

The Urban Country: Holland

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 21:17, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:35

Rem Koolhaas once described the urban as pervasive. It took a tour of Holland for me to grasp quite what he meant. While Paris is mocked as a museum-city due to its protected urban tissue, in Holland it is the farmland that is protected, the rural tissue that cannot be modernized. This makes the experience of moving in the country, which is about the same size as the Dallas-Fort-Worth metropolis and has more people, utterly surreal.

The mathematical definition of a city

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Thu, 10/18/2007 - 00:31, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:09

20th century professional urbanism is the story of a war on complexity in order to control urbanization.

The modernists rebelled against the "mess" of the city. They put everything in their place. In this square shall be the houses. In that square the offices. In that square the stores. In some form of another, this system, called zoning, is in force over 99% of the American continent. Its main advantage is that it is incredibly lazy.

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