Death and Life of Great American Cities

To walk the path of Jane Jacobs - review of What We See, Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:29:41 +0000

Jane Jacobs died in the spring of 2006. Three years earlier she had published the last book of her illustrious career as a philosopher, Dark Age Ahead, prophesying the fall of North American civilization. Today, this civilization is having a severe stroke due to all the factors that she warned us about.

Squatter urbanism comes to America

Mathieu Helie — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:35:00 +0000

In previous posts I argued that the only way a modern housing subdivision was possible was by the creation of a permanent, extreme housing crisis by the authorities attempting to control development. Now this housing crisis is catching up with American cities and a phenomenon that was until then limited to dysfunctional third world countries, squatter camps, is popping up all over the country.

The Journey to Emergence

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:00:00 +0000

This is part I of a series of excerpts of an article to be published in the International Journal of Architectural Research entitled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Additional parts will be posted on this blog with the editor's permission until the complete article appears exclusively in the journal's upcoming issue.

Fake Complexity - Mixed Used Development

Mathieu Helie — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:03:04 +0000

The economic crash has cities scrambling to keep their real estate markets alive. Disappearing credit has caused many of the most capital-intensive projects, meaning big buildings, to halt. Some have been surprised that projects modeled on traditional patterns of urbanism, such as mixed-used developments, have been caught up in the storm. It's one thing when a lone skyscraper or a subdivision at the edge the city stops dead in development. It's simple to ignore and get around.

Emerging the city

Mathieu Helie — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:23:58 +0000

In the 20th century, the modern movement in architecture drew up grand plans to remake cities for the machine age. Le Corbusier, the leader of the movement, conceived his Radiant City plan. He designed every part of it himself so that it would work as he had willed it to. His machine provided the solution to four problems: inhabitation, work, recreation, circulation. Everything else was removed.

The idea of a machine city expressed three assumptions that led to the catastrophic results of modernism.