Urban form
Why the city has the shape it has. Layout, density, height and the legacy of decisions taken a century ago.
No city has the shape it has by accident. The layout of its streets, the height of its buildings, the density of its neighbourhoods and the size of its blocks are decisions — sometimes a century old — that still govern how people live today.
Here are the analyses on urban form and morphology: the grid against the historic centre, the planned extension, the zoning that separates uses, the low-density suburb, the skyscraper and its logic, and the plans that shaped modern cities. And the urban history that explains them: the first cities, the industrial city, the utopias that were attempted and what remains of them.
The shape of a city is the sum of its rules: the permitted height, the width of the block, the distance to work.
None of that was decided by geography.
- Urban form
Edge cities: skylines built at a highway exit
Joel Garreau and Robert Fishman explain edge cities: offices and malls that grew at motorway junctions without…
7 min read - Urban form
Liminal spaces: why the non-place unsettles us
Marc Augé, Rem Koolhaas and George Ritzer explain the non-place: airports, malls and terminals with no history,…
7 min read - Urban history
Ghetto: the cage that also worked as a shield
Wacquant, Wirth, Sennett and Kenneth Clark: how forced enclosure in Venice, Rome and Chicago also ended up…
7 min read - Urban history
Facadism: keeping the wall and demolishing the building
Ruskin, Venturi and Baudrillard against facadism: why the front is saved, everything behind it is razed, and the…
7 min read - Urban form
Liquid city: the megalopolis that never stops
Gottmann, John Rennie Short and Harvey: why the Boston-Washington corridor behaves like a river of concrete, and…
7 min read - Urban form
Elijah Anderson: the code of the street and invisible borders
Elijah Anderson documented the code of the street in Philadelphia: unwritten rules on respect and violence that…
Elijah Anderson 2 min read - Urban history
Christine Boyer: How the City Turns Memory into a Tool of Power
M. Christine Boyer shows in The City of Collective Memory that heritage and urban images are selected and…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban form
Néstor García Canclini: Where Cultures Mix, Belonging Emerges
Néstor García Canclini explains Latin American urban culture as hybridity: Hybrid Cultures, consumption as…
3 min read - Urban form
How Five Elements Make a City Legible and Accessible
Kevin Lynch's five elements, paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, explain how people read a city, and…
3 min read - Urban form
Mariana Valverde: How Small Rules Order Our City
Mariana Valverde shows that licences, zoning, regulations and policing produce urban order decision by decision.…
Mariana Valverde 3 min read - Urban form
Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York and the Culture of Congestion
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas's retroactive manifesto: the culture of congestion, Rockefeller Center as a city…
Rem Koolhaas 2 min read - Urban history
Patrick Geddes: regionalism and cities in evolution
Who Patrick Geddes was and what he gave urban planning: regionalism, environmental planning, the city as an…
Patrick Geddes 2 min read - Urban history
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City
A summary of Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City (1966): the city as a historical artifact, urban…
Aldo Rossi 2 min read - Urban history
Friedrich Engels and the Industrial City: The Origins of Urban Justice
Engels described in 1845 how Manchester hid its workers and in 1872 why housing cannot be solved by reform. His…
Friedrich Engels 3 min read - Urban history
Lewis Mumford: five thousand years of city in one book
From Mesopotamia to the industrial city, Mumford shows each era built the city it deserved, and judges the…
Lewis Mumford 2 min read - Urban form
Michael Hibbard: Regional Planning for Social Justice
Michael Hibbard defends a regional and community planning that shares development between city and countryside.…
Michael Hibbard 3 min read - Urban form
Michael Dear: Postmodernism and Critical Urban Planning
Michael Dear led the Los Angeles School and brought postmodernism into urban planning. What the postmodern city is…
Michael Dear 3 min read - Urban form
John Forester: Dialogue and Mediation for Inclusive Urban Planning
John Forester explains what planners do among conflicting interests and how dialogue and mediation produce fairer…
John Forester 2 min read - Urban form
Vertical by Stephen Graham: The City from Satellites to Bunkers
Stephen Graham shows in Vertical that the city is a volume: skyscrapers and drones above, tunnels and bunkers…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Urban history
Peter Hall's Cities of Tomorrow: A History of Urban Planning
Cities of Tomorrow (1988) by Peter Hall traces the twentieth century's planning ideas, from Howard to Le Corbusier,…
Peter Hall 2 min read - Urban form
Jaime Lerner: the urban acupuncture of Curitiba
Lerner argues that one small, well-placed intervention transforms a whole neighbourhood. He proved it as mayor of…
Jaime Lerner 2 min read - Urban history
Christine Boyer: Collective Memory and Urban Planning
The City of Collective Memory (1994) by Christine Boyer explains how the city stores memory and how regeneration…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban history
Divided Berlin: The History of a Fractured City, 1945-1989
Berlin Divided City, edited by Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, explains how the Cold War produced two Berlins.…
Philip Broadbent 3 min read - Urban history
A City on a Lake by Matthew Vitz: Mexico City and Its Lake
A City on a Lake by Matthew Vitz explains how Mexico City grew on the drained Lake Texcoco and how water, forests…
Matthew Vitz 3 min read - Urban history
Chris Ealham and Barcelona's Class Struggle (1898-1937)
Chris Ealham reconstructs how industrial Barcelona produced anarcho-syndicalism and how strikes, riots and planning…
Chris Ealham 3 min read - Urban history
Robert Caro and Robert Moses: The Legacy of The Power Broker
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, tells how Robert Moses transformed New York without ever being elected: parks,…
Robert Caro 3 min read - Urban form
Peter Calthorpe and The Next American Metropolis: The Origin of TOD
The Next American Metropolis (1993) by Peter Calthorpe formulated transit-oriented development against the…
Peter Calthorpe 2 min read - Urban history
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, the History of London
London: The Biography (2000) by Peter Ackroyd tells two thousand years of London as the life of an organism. From…
Peter Ackroyd 3 min read - Urban history
Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City
Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar AlSayyad explains Cairo as superimposed cities, from Fustat and the Fatimids to…
3 min read - Urban form
Strategic Urban Planning: Patsy Healey's Collaborative Approach
Strategic urban planning sets a long-term vision for a city with all its stakeholders. What Patsy Healey proposes…
Patsy Healey 3 min read - Urban history
Haussmann's Paris and Capitalist Modernization: David Harvey
The Haussmannization of Paris (1853-1870) built boulevards, displaced workers and absorbed surplus capital.
David Harvey 2 min read - Urban history
David Foster: Buenos Aires as Cultural and Political Stage
David William Foster read Buenos Aires as a text: Borges, Cortázar, the cinema of Torre Nilsson and Bemberg, Evita…
David Foster 3 min read - Urban form
David Rusk and Metropolitan Fragmentation: Cities Without Suburbs
David Rusk explained in Cities Without Suburbs how metropolitan fragmentation produces inequality: elastic and…
David Rusk 2 min read - Urban history
Decolonising Urban Heritage: Statues, Streets and Memory
Decolonising urban heritage reviews which colonial monuments and names occupy public space. What Sharon Zukin and…
3 min read - Urban form
Reurbanization and Urban Renewal: Opportunities, Risks and Cases
Reurbanization reuses central land but can expel residents. What Sharon Zukin, Neil Smith and Michael Storper…
3 min read - Urban form
New Urbanism: Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Suburban Nation
What New Urbanism is and what Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk propose in Suburban Nation: mixed-use,…
2 min read - Urban form
The 15-Minute City: What It Is, How It Works and Its Critics
Carlos Moreno's 15-minute city brings housing, work, services and leisure within a quarter of an hour on foot.
3 min read - Urban form
The Horizontal City and Suburbanisation: Fishman and Hall on Sprawl
The horizontal city grows outward with low density, cars and highways. How Robert Fishman and Peter Hall explain…
3 min read - Urban form
Learning from Las Vegas: Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour
A summary of Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour: modernist functionalism…
2 min read - Urban form
Postmodern Urban Planning: Assemblage, Participation and Critique
What postmodern urban planning is: Sandercock and insurgent planning, Healey, the assemblage theory of Farías and…
2 min read -
Facadism: keeping the wall and demolishing the building
Ruskin, Venturi and Baudrillard against facadism: why the front is saved, everything behind it is razed, and the…
1 min read -
Urban anaesthesia: why the city makes us ignore each other
Simmel, Milgram and Goffman explain urban indifference: stimulus overload, the familiar stranger and civil…
1 min read
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Shorts
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Is this a real city… or just a spectacle? -
Cities for People: Redesigning Our Cities According to Jan Gehl -
How Should Our Cities Work? Jane Jacobs and the Urban Planning Revolution -
Space Syntax. Streets obey mathematical equations -
When a single structure is bigger than the neighborhood around it -
Was the a Myth? The Dark Side of ’s Tower Boom -
Viral Architecture. Cities built for likes, not just life -
Master plans that change everything on paper… and nothing in reality
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