Over the last few weeks I have begun to rethink my ideals for the design of cities at the block level of scale. Yesterday my colleague Raffaele Pernice reviewed the history of modern urban design with our class. His slides reminded me that the mid-19th-century industrial city is often seen as the starting-point, the problem. […]
Rethinking urban forms and ideals Read More »
One of the maddening obstacles to making cities both interesting and affordable in the United States is the opposition to real urban housing. Back in 1920 there was good reason to fear density: we had just figured out how to deal with contagious diseases. And apartments at that time were still cramped, dim, and poorly-ventilated. In
The Will to House! Read More »
Last week I assigned an unusual text for my students: the city of Suzhou itself. In this post I am going to show some examples of what I mean by reading the city as a text. My first examples are quite literal. I began looking at the lids that cover infrastructure immediately after I arrived in
Reading the infrastructure Read More »
Today I have just completed my first month in China. Time permitting I will get back to blog-postings that include lots of photos. But for today, I wanted to reflect on issues of urban politics and what that means for my work in China. 1. Addressing some paranoias about China When I was preparing to
Urbanism and Geopolitics Read More »