1. Fantastic Journal’s post Lines of Defense, which I would cheapen if I summarized it. More nostalgia, I suppose.
2. The NYTimes on Brussels, “traumatized” by the “dreadful architecture” of the European Union headquarters, and how planners hope to rectify the rift between bureaucrats and residents. What a direct metaphor for the conflict between the old and the new political arrangements, complete with lack of obvious villain or saint:
“They were drilling for piles, about a year ago, and they failed to shore up the neighboring homes,” said Alexandre Smets, 32, whose dental laboratory is in a home now held up by massive steel buttresses. Reflecting Brussels residents’ phlegmatic side, neither he nor the building’s other tenants plan to move out.
3. sevensixfive has a great post entitled “Port Covington: The Ghost of the Masterplan in Tinkerer’s Paradise”, part of his continuing series of ruminations on spaces in Baltimore’s Middle Branch. Lost railroads, a forgotten Cigar Ship, and abandoned big box retailers share psychic and physical space with banal New Urbanist development plans; the conflation of the fantastical and the mundane that permeates the Middle Branch series is not only good, but necessary, as it is true.
4. Transport Politic compares a proposed high-speed rail line between St. Louis and Chicago with the massively successful route between Lyon and Paris and concludes that a few well-funded projects are better than many half-hearted efforts.
5. Via Landscape+Urbanism, Kent State University’s Shrinking Cities Institute, particularly their Vacant Lot Re-use Pattern Booklet.
6. Varnelis speculates on the death of the suburbs, as caused by the accumulation of small deteriorations in infrastructure.
