urban tissue

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.

The Fundamentals of Urban Complexity

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:00:11 +0000

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

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:13:29 +0000

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

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:43:34 +0000

Serifos in Greece

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.