Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.
Category: Planning & Design
What makes a city tick? Designing the ‘urban DMA’
ARTICLE
Kim Dovey & Elek Pafka, The Conversation, November 2, 2016
When we talk about “urban DMA”, we’re talking about the density of a city’s buildings, the way people and activities are mixed together, and the access, or transport networks that we use to navigate through them.
For more from The Conversation on cities, click here.
First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.
Jan Gehl, architect
We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.
Le Corbusier, architect
Streets and their sidewalks – the main public places of a city – are its most vital organs.
Jane Jacobs, journalist
When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.
Robert Moses, public official
The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy.
Le Corbusier, architect
If anybody at any time wanted to pay professionals to make a city planning idea which would kill city life, it could not have done better than what the modernists accomplished.
Jan Gehl, architect
You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.
Le Corbusier, architect
Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.
Jane Jacobs, journalist
Which Buildings in Manhattan Couldn’t be Built Again Today?
INFOGRAPHIC
Quoctrung Bui, Matt A.V. Chaban And Jeremy White, New York Times, May 20 2016
As the zoning code enters its second century, it is worth considering the ways it has shaped the city; whether and where it is still working; and how it might be altered so the city can continue to grow without obliterating everything New Yorkers love about it.
King’s Cross: urban transformation
SHORT FILM
Pauline den Hartog Jager, Monocle, 12 May 2016
It is expected that this year around 30,000 people will be visiting King’s Cross every day, for that we have to thank its developers Argent, who have focused just as much on a manifesto of good living, as they have on a bottom line. “Once we had been confirmed, one of our first jobs was to write this first document called, ‘Principles for a Human City’ which was published in July 2001, and we set out 10 principles for what we though should be a fantastic piece of this world city.”
Urban Provocations
SHORT FILM
Andrew Tuck, Monocle, 26 April 2016
…but too often you’re faced with another project that repeats the default design solutions of the day and ignores the simple fixes that were needed all along. Here are some Monocle dos and don’ts, and polite provocations, for making better cities.
Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize 2016 Laureate: Medellín
SHORT FILM
Lee Kwan Yew World City Prize, 2016
We live in a time when billions of people are moving into cities. Many of these cities, especially the new mega cities, are very dangerous and disorganised. Many of them are getting worse, and many of them are are looking for role models of cities which have transformed themselves, and no city has done as great a job as Medellín has.
For more about the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, click here.
On how to make an attractive city
SHORT FILM
School of Life, 26 Jan 2015
Cities are a big deal. We pretty much all have to live in them. We should try hard to get them right. So few cities are nice, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful; embarrassingly the more appealing ones tend to be old, which is weird because we’re mostly much better at making things now.
For a related articles and short films by The School of Life on Ugliness and the Housing Crisis click here and on Relativism and Urban Planning click here.