Why and how to address the disparity in a park system when financial and technical innovations have helped support an era of new and improved public parks.
Category: the city in history
river, highway, and market (3.4)
Retracing the place-making function of a lost river in the neighborhood.
urbanism and monumentality (3.3)
Monumental telecommunication infrastructure in contemporary urbanism affords a variety of stable, actionable pictures of the city advancing perceptions of individual agency.
the enigma of the urban ruins (3.2)
At about 1300sqft, the dimension of the average home has remained remarkably constant throughout history. Could this have to do with home communications?
cities of the plain (3.1)
Cities of the Plain is a name that Mumford uses to point to the origins of the city, but is also commonly used to refer to Sodom and Gomorrah.
from ‘protection’ to destruction (2.5)
Cities have always competed with one another, but is the recent competitiveness for the highest quality of life a break with a past of war between cities?
law and urban order (2.4)
Niagara Falls is Toronto’s Coney Island. Where Rem Koolhaas described Coney Island as the appendage of New York City, a Manhattan in miniature, Niagara Falls is the flaccid member of the City of Toronto and even Southwestern Ontario. The Falls swell during the day to impress the throngs of tourists that flock to its frothy… Continue reading law and urban order (2.4)
anxiety, sacrifice, and aggression (2.3)
“No matter how many valuable functions the city has furthered, it has also served, throughout most of its history, as a container of organized violence and a transmitter of war.” With my graduate studies completed, I’m coming back to my little project here of posting something regularly in response to the chapter headings and content… Continue reading anxiety, sacrifice, and aggression (2.3)
the first urban implosion (2.2)
Alhazen was asked to build a dam on the Nile in the 11th Century by the vindictive and ruthless caliph al-Hakim. In surveying the selected site, Alhazen determined that the project was impossible. To avoid punishment for his failure in damming the Nile under al-Hakim, Alhazen pretended to have gone mad. In consequence, he entered… Continue reading the first urban implosion (2.2)
the first urban transformation (2.1)
Ours is an age of a multitude of socially undirected technical advances, divorced from any other ends than the advancement of science and technology. We live in fact in an exploding universe of mechanical and electronic invention, whose parts are moving at a rapid pace ever further and further away from their human center, and… Continue reading the first urban transformation (2.1)