Sublime

What is that balance? Better to ask: what do humans do? Work, shop, eat, drink, learn, recreate, convene, worship, heal, visit, celebrate, sleep: these are all activities that people should not have to leave downtown to accomplish. While there are exceptions, most large and midsized American downtowns possess a good supply of all of the above excep

At the time Washington was designated to be the capital of the young United States, Americans seem almost universally to have believed that because it was to be the capital, it was destined to become a great commercial and industrial city too, a London, Paris or Rome. But cities simply cannot be “explained” by their locations or other given resourc

Elinor Ostrom,

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

You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicio

According to Adam Baacke, Lowell’s assistant city manager for planning and development, achieving this transformation was essentially a three-step process that could perhaps be best described as politics, permitting, and pathfinding. Politics refers to changing attitudes (and people) on the city council, where most members shunned downtown housing

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

Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety. First, they give people—both residents and strangers—concrete reasons for using the sidewalks on which these enterprises face. Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to public use in th

No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Furthermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill o