Sublime

Knowledge work is less structured, more spontaneous, and harder to teach. “Our knowledge,” says Glaeser, “builds on things that we learn from people around us.“ Being close to other knowledge workers makes it easier for us to learn new things and develop new ideas. As such, knowledge work is best done in cities.

The problem is to hamper excess duplications at one place, and divert them instead to other places in which they will not be excess duplications, but healthy additions. The other places may be at some distance, or very close by indeed. But in any case they cannot be fixed on arbitrarily. They must be places where the use concerned will have an exce

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Lately a few planners, notably Reginald Isaacs of Harvard, have daringly begun to question whether the conception of neighborhood in big cities has any meaning at all. Isaacs points out that city people are mobile. They can and do pick and choose from the entire city (and beyond) for everything from a job, a dentist, recreation, or friends, to shop

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Death and Life became the most famous book on urban planning. It is fundamentally about the natural origins and benefits of “the spontaneous order.” Written a third of a century after Euclid normalized centralized planning, Death and Life rejected that precedent, arguing that throughout human history, cities had been built on spontaneity, with mill... See more

Yet neither of these parks is so complex in plan as all that. Intricacy that counts is mainly intricacy at eye level, change in the rise of ground, groupings of trees, openings leading to various focal points—in short, subtle expressions of difference. The subtle differences in setting are then exaggerated by the differences in use that grow up amo

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Abolishing the off-street parking requirement is one of the three cornerstones of Shoup’s theory, because it would allow the market to determine how much parking is needed. He notes that “removing off-street parking requirements will not eliminate off-street parking, but will instead stimulate an active commercial market for it.”37 This would bring

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This introduces two important concepts: first, the idea of scaling, which refers to how measurable properties of a system change with its size; second, the concept of economies of scale. The latter means that, as cities grow, they need less of something per person: roads, sewers, or gas stations, for example. What’s more, such economies of scale in

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Proponents of parks, like the advocates of urban planning, struggled to articulate a rationale for what was a rather novel political idea in the laissez-faire era of politics in the United States. Developing parks required all the tactics we currently use in our modern urban planning apparatus: the condemnation and taking of private property for pu

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Mais le sort de la plupart des mégapoles et capitales, livrées à l’économie libérale, reste sous la domination des promoteurs et des spéculateurs, d’une part, et, d’autre part, de spécialistes (urbanistes, architectes) compartimentés chacun dans son domaine, qui ne perçoivent nullement le caractère multidimensionnel des problèmes urbains et sont in

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