Category: Meet the Urbanists: The Canon

Articles Global Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Physicists Talks Urban Economics Urbanisation

The Science of Sustainable Cities

ARTICLE / TALK

Centre for Liveable Cities, Urban Solutions, July 2018

Underlying the extraordinary complexity and diversity of cities is an approximate simplicity. As a city increases in size, all of its various socioeconomic metrics scale in the same way no matter where you are on the planet. Through analysing data from thousands of cities in different countries, I found that when the size of a city doubles, there is an approximate 15% increase in its socioeconomic outcomes—from income, wealth and number of patents, to crime rate and number of flu cases. This scaling law is valid across the globe, although cities have evolved independently.

To watch Geoffrey West’s 2011 TED Talk click here.

Cities for People Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Podcasts USA

Jane Jacobs

PODCAST

Andrew Tuck, The Urbanist, Monocle, 15 December 2016

And really, Jane was the first time where I’d read a critique of cities and it really spoke to me, really resonated, it was incredibly human. It talked about mistakes and failure, it talked about things being imperfect, about things being informal, about the spontaneity, the ballet and dance of life that happens on our city streets.

Articles Driving Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Modernist Cities Newspapers (Print & Online) USA

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro review – a landmark study

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 Oct 2015

ARTICLE

Technically, Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker is a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, but that description feels laughably inadequate on multiple counts. For more than four decades, this particular urban planner was the most powerful man in New York, an unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. Caro’s enormous book, meanwhile, is less a life story than an epic, meticulously detailed study of power in general: how it’s acquired, how it’s used to change history, how it ultimately corrupts those who get it.

See also Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.

Architects Articles Codes, Density & Urban Form France Global Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Modernist Cities USA

AD Classics: Ville Radieuse / Le Corbusier

ARTICLE

Arch Daily, 11 August, 2013

In accordance with modernist ideals of progress (which encouraged the annihilation of tradition), The Radiant City was to emerge from a tabula rasa: it was to be built on nothing less than the grounds of demolished vernacular European cities. The new city would contain prefabricated and identical high-density skyscrapers, spread across a vast green area and arranged in a Cartesian grid, allowing the city to function as a “living machine.” Le Corbusier explains: “The city of today is a dying thing because its planning is not in the proportion of geometrical one fourth. The result of a true geometrical lay-out is repetition, The result of repetition is a standard. The perfect form.”

For images and information on Le Corbusier’s architectural projects on the UNESCO World Heritage List click here. See also Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City, The Human Scale and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.

Cities for People Documentaries Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Social Enterprises / NGOs The Public Realm USA

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

DOCUMENTARY

William H. Whyte, Project for Public Spaces, 1980

One major finding began to shine through, and I’ll now share it with you. ‘People tend sit where there are places to sit.’ This may not strike you as an intellectual bombshell, but this simple lesson is one that very few cities have ever heeded – they’re tough places to sit in.

 

This documentary is not available on line at this time of writing, but if you can get hold if it, it is a great watch.