“We want to take SimCity off the graph paper and build cities with curved roads, more European cities and not just gridded cities. We want the city to feel like a place, not a map.”
“Change the dream and you change the city.”
Nice piece on MoMA’s “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” on polis.
Image: “Nature-City” by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac.
“Let’s mobilize our efforts to fulfill Stalin’s plan on reconstruction of Moscow. The plan signed by Stalin cannot be unfulfilled!”
Great set of images of 1930s Moscow at Retronaut.
The 1934 plan to fill in the Hudson River and join Manhattan to New Jersey:
“When every possible subterranean necessity had been anticipated and built, a secondary fill would bring the level up to within twenty-five feet of the Manhattan street level. Upon this level would rest the foundations and basements of the buildings that would make up the new city above, planned for fresh air, sunshine and beauty. Thus, below the street level would be a subterranean system of streets that would serve a double purpose. All heavy trucking would be confined to it, but primarily it would serve as a great military defense against gas attack in case of war, for in it would be room for practically the entire population of the city.”
Full story, Gothamist.
“At most times, the urbanologist and the anthropologist are one and the same.” airoots/eirut
“This quasi-anthropological approach towards the observation of urbanity derives largely from the belief that designing for a context such as Dharavi – or any urban condition, for that matter – must necessarily occur with the involvement of its inhabitants, the end users.” From URBZ: Crowdsourcing the city, a great piece in Domus
Photo: The street bazaar on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Dharavi
James Rojas has built an 80-square-foot scale model of downtown Long Beach for people to rearrange, add to and generally envision what the future of the city could be.
“People get creative. One person uses little marks on popsicle sticks to show where parking lots are located.”
Auroville (City of Dawn) is an “experimental” township in Viluppuram district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India near Puducherry in South India. (Wikipedia) (via butdoesitfloat)
“It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.”
Michael Kimmelman (in the NYT) on “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011”
Photo: The view south from Park Avenue and 94th Street, around 1882.
Woodcut by Richard V. Correll (1904-1990) for the Voice of Action, Seattle’s Communist Party newspaper (1933). More.
