new-urbanism – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: new-urbanism

May 3, 2011 – 1:10 pm

a pre-modern critique of the new urbanism

A minor point, but this is kind of fascinating — a critique of New Urbanism which, rather than going the common route of charging New Urbanism with nostalgic pre-modernism, argues that New Urbanism is insufficiently pre-modern — in this specific case, arguing that New Urbanists have praised a certain kind of narrow traditional street but […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
November 20, 2010 – 5:00 am

territories of urbanism

On Urban Omnibus, Genevieve Sherman recaps last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program.  The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired by New Urbanists in […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
November 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm

fracture-prone

[An image from Mark Luthringer’s “Ridgemont Typologies“] In an excerpt on Slate from his latest book (Makeshift Metropolis), Witold Rybczynski asks the question: what kind of cities do we want? Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the 20th century, one answer is unequivocal—Americans want to live in […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
August 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm

spillway on jacobs

Will Wiles writes about the veneration of Jane Jacobs by New Urbanists, delving into his own history of reading Jacobs and coming back out with a series of well-made points, from the realization that battling over the legacy and proper reading of a single urbanist like Jacobs is rather unhelpful, to noting that proximity to […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments (5) | Permalink
June 14, 2010 – 5:30 pm

of jane jacobs and ipods

An excellent post at Kosmograd, “The Ballet of iPod City”, ably connects two items that mammoth has recently written about, the iPod (and iPhone) factory-city in Shenzhen and Benjamin Schwarz’s critical essay on post-Jacobsian urbanists in the Atlantic Monthly: …Jacobs founded a powerful myth of urbanism, that the sine qua non of urban form was to […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
May 18, 2010 – 8:00 pm

teenagers and young people, in the city like locusts

With the publication of their latest issue, The Atlantic Monthly launched a month-long sub-site that they’re calling “The Future of the City”, which interests us for obvious reasons.   In particular, the articles on the potential of private transit and post-Jacobsian urbanists are worth reading (and if I get a chance I’ll pull excerpts from […]

By rholmes | Posted in readings, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged | Comments (35) | Permalink
December 21, 2009 – 2:47 pm

ordinance sculptors

[Manhattan skyscraper zoning ordinances, given visual form by Hugh Ferriss; image from Kosmograd’s flickr account] 1 The tricky thing with Duany is sorting out what is a genuine attempt to improve cities and what might be a carefully-constructed shield for the extension of the corporate real estate economy (so long as Duany says things like […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, urbanism | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am

the atlantic on new orleans

Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, readings | Also tagged , , , | Comments (14) | Permalink
October 16, 2009 – 11:11 am

paris on the anacostia

A New Urbanist (edit: see comments for update) proposal to channelize the Anacostia and extend a modified version of the L’Enfant Plan to its newly narrowed banks, summarized here, is attracting a bit of attention here in DC (also here, here, and here). 1As commentator “Capitol Dome” notes at Greater Greater Washington, the plan proposes […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments (21) | Permalink