sustainable development

The patterns of place

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:00:51 +0000

(This article originally appeared in Get Ahead Magazine, for the Get Ahead Festival of independent short films in Brooklyn.)

Defining a new traditional urbanism

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:55:26 +0000

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.

Don't demolish Detroit

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:50:53 +0000

The following story about a presidential program to demolish whole neighborhoods of inner city fabric in the United States and turn them back into wilderness has been making the rounds around news blogs.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

The development model is finished

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:59:48 +0000

An interesting graph on the state of the housing subdivision industry in America posted at the Daily Reckoning.

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.

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.

The collapse of rural cities

Mathieu Helie — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:31:14 +0000

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.