Sublime

We still have decades of auto-dependent land use trends to offset, but small shifts in the way our received infrastructure is designed can go a long way to making our neighborhoods more walkable — and in turn healthier, more affordable, and more vibrant.

While the trend for a century or more has been to make urban environments frictionless, a recent counter-trend has tried to slow things down, reintroducing pedestrianised areas, or making children’s play areas slightly less safe so as to help them learn about risk. Going further, we could imagine environments that prompt wisdom, not just by providi

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In situations where the degree of crowding can be determined freely, the upper limit for an acceptable density in streets and on sidewalks with two-way pedestrian traffic appears to be around 10 to 15 pedestrians per minute per meter (3 ft.) street width. This corresponds to a pedestrian flow of some one hundred people per minute in a 10-meter-wide

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The Danish cooperative housing project Tinggården [49], consisting of eighty rental housing units built in 1978, is an example of a building complex in which planners carefully considered both social and physical structure. The goal was to get processes and project to work together. Planning was a joint venture of the future residents and the archi

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Landscape architects are increasingly embracing desire lines from the outset, allowing desire lines to emerge in parks and campuses over a period of many months, and then paving the lines to make permanent walkways. The approach is certainly preferable to the more common alternative: Attempt to predict how people will navigate a landscape, render t

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Alexander is inspired by how design occurs in the natural world. "Things that are good have a certain kind of structure," he told me. "You can't get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you've got continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That's why they have the qualities tha

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To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for dif

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