ORDER WITHOUT DESIGN

ORDER WITHOUT DESIGN

Last summer I ran into Alain Bertaud in Charleston (above). We had first met in India, when he was at the World Bank and I was at McGill Uiversity, working on a research project with B.V. Doshi’s Vastu Shilpa Foundation. I had not seen Alain in the intervening forty...
THE OLD URBANISM

THE OLD URBANISM

Traditional urbanism is an easy sell; most people favor treed squares, fountains, and benches. People in Philadelphia crowd Rittenhouse Square, which was laid out in the 17th century, and whose Parisian details were planned by Paul Cret in 1913. The buildings lining...
THE FOG OF LIFE

THE FOG OF LIFE

A recent conversation on GoodFellows, a podcast from the Hoover Institution, concerned Niall Ferguson’s recent book Doom, and included a comparison between military and civilian planning. This brought to mind what I have always thought was a weakness of the discipline...
URBAN DISCONTINUITIES

URBAN DISCONTINUITIES

Transect Urbanism is a collection of essays that describe a seminal idea of the New Urbanism movement. The concept is roughly based on observations made by Alexander von Humboldt, a nineteenth-century Prussian naturalist and Patrick Geddes, a twentieth-century...
THE AFTER TIME

THE AFTER TIME

A lot has been written about the effect of Covid-19 and the associated year-long shutdown, on cities. The present situation is dispiriting: so many of the amenities that attracted people to cities in the first place—theaters, museums, ball parks, restaurants, bars—are...
THE THIN VENEER

THE THIN VENEER

The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unravel. For the first half day, drivers observed traffic light signals, then...