urban history

Paris' tree-lined streets

During the reign of French King Henry IV from 1579 to 1610, he and his Duke of Sully remade French infrastructure with tree-lined highways. A new word was introduced, promenade: a special walk to see and to be seen.[read more]

In our culture we have a tendency to look for new technologies that can make it easier for us to do things the same. The topic of sustainability and mitigating our effect on the environment suffers from this more than most despite the fact that the real opportunities for sustainable progress will come not from gadgets and gizmos, but a behavioral shift.[read more]

The ABC of Architects, a video created by Fedelpeye, a motion design/production firm and a group named Ombú Architecture hit the front pages of Vimeo this week. The video flips through, in alphabetical order, famous architects and the iconic structure that best sums up their portfolio of work. For me, the beauty of this animation is in the way it offers lines and colors.[read more]

Did you know that today's open planned home has more in common with the medieval hall? Both emphasize flexibility and adaptability. The sofa itself isn't European, but really of Arabic origin. Kitchens were separate structures in grand houses of medieval England run by a multitude of servants. Only after the first world war did kitchens enter the home.[read more]

Shalom Jacobovitz

Around 5000 years ago, the first cities emerged in Mesopotamia and the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Agricultural surpluses enabled a few people to start specializing in something other than agriculture. The farmer who now had extra grain could trade for a better spear or a winter fur coat. This specialization and...[read more]

Are we living in McMansions and suburban plots because we want to? Or because government policy has pushed us to do so? People keep writing about the effect of our urban policies, but very few outside the urbanist blogosphere write about the policies themselves. The articles that result satisfy our curiosity about change but fail to actually inform.[read more]

Iran is known as one of the oldest civilisations in the world, and many of the origins of urban planning and design can be traced back the country. The Persian built environment has been a major influence in shaping an urban tradition now generically considered to be that of the Islamic city; not only that, but it has had a considerable...[read more]

 Smokestack chasing.  Garden cities.  Tactical Urbanism.  New Urbanism.  Creative cities.  What do all these have in common?  They all reveal the greatest weakness of urban planning as a discipline.  The reliance upon urban development trends, which shift every few years, has ruined neighborhoods,...[read more]

After finishing Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights by David Kushner, I have spent the past week educating myself in the Levitt Brothers and their enormous contribution to housing, land use, and race relations in America.By David KushnerThe Levitt family were a team of three men: Abraham (father), and...[read more]

In my effort to interview some of the intellectual leaders in today’s built environment conversations, I caught up with Mitchell Silver, current President of the American Planning Association to get his thoughts on some of the current trends within urban planning today and what we might expect for the future. His outlook really provides...[read more]

In a fascinating new book, Rethinking a Lot, M.I.T landscape architecture and planning professor Eran Ben-Joseph tells us there are now 600 million cars worldwide, and more than 500 million surface parking lots in the U.S. alone. In some cities, parking lots take up one-third of all land area, “becoming the single...[read more]

The following is a summary of and reflection on Zoning by Edward Murray Bassett, published by the National Municipal League in 1922. After writing the first comprehensive zoning ordinance for New York City six years earlier, Bassett had become the preeminent authority in the U.S. on this emerging land use tool. This is his case to cities...[read more]