"A conference in which internationally celebrated cultural theorists explored the role art plays in forming our experience of modern cities."

"In advance of his new book on Lagos, architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas explores the particular dynamics of that city, its modes of dispersal and reclamation, and describes the flexibility, intensity and efficiency with which it functions."

"DSB: We are very interested in archetypes, in typologies. Imagine a toy train that runs through a small, toy-train town. What would the post office, schoolhouse, and town hall look like in that little town? Those are generic types." (Via Fish.)

14 references to Ebenezer Howard in this book, and 12 to Le Corbusier.

"Seminariekväll med utgångspunkt i den nyutkomna boken om Tage William-Olsson [den] innovative och kontroversielle arkitekten vars mest kända verk [är] Slussen."

How to do a 1:1000 scale model of Your city. (Via Dan Hill.)

"An international seminar with urbanism as the general theme."

"Fördjupning av översiktsplanen för Lunds stad." (Kapitel två beskriver "Lund som stad" i syfte att "lämna riktlinjer vid komplettering och nybyggnad".)

Interesting because Le Corbusier refers to Sitte in 'The City of Tomorrow and its Planning'. (Via fishea.)

"What should suburbia look like? Frank Lloyd Wright had an answer for that, too." (Via fishea.)

"An Arcology is based on Paolo Soleri's concept of the development of compact 3-D alternatives to existing urban sprawls, combining more efficient use of land and resources." (Via Håkan Kjellerstrand.)

"However, in spite of the simplifications made in What is the optimal shape of a city? by Carl Bender et al, their results provide food for thought for supercomputer designers and Sim Mayors." (Via Michael Williams. Thanks!)

"Although continuous, the city is more blunt than seamless, more startling than predictable. The disconcerted continuity of this urban moment recalls the disparity between adjoining yet dissimilar images in narrative cinema [...]." (Via Anne Galloway.)

"[S]he would get on a subway and get off at various stations [to] walk around exploring [and] noticed that businesses tended to cluster [She observed and made] conclusions about the interactions of people, where they work and live [etc.]" (Via somebody.)

Via 2 Blowhards.

"New urbanism is often attacked for being stylistically retrograde [...]. In an apparent attempt to de­fuse this argument, [this book] plumbs a variety of nontraditional architectural sources, including [Gropius, Aalto and Kahn]" (via John Massengale).

"The pioneering 1916 [New York] Zoning Resolution [...] established height and setback controls and separated what were seen as functionally incompatible uses -- such as factories -- from residential neighborhoods."

Absolutely brilliant post!

On how we can learn from "the way we manage complex human settlements in the real world" in designing "intranets" (via Andrew Otwell).

"Nikos Salingaros interviews Léon Krier."

"The ideal capital city is a perfect square, each nine li [4.5 km] on a side, bisected by a central meridinal axis so that it forms the ideographic character for earth and China."

"[Stadsbyggnadskontoret har] beskrivit hur Stockholm kan växa, vilka infrastrukturinvesteringar som krävs och hur vi ska åstadkomma en socialt, ekonomiskt och ekologiskt hållbar stadsbebyggelse."

"There are some good reasons that urban planners, just like software designers, are unable to see past issues of scalability, and fall back on tree structures for everything." (Via Dan Hill.)

"Michael J. Dear and a growing number of his colleagues argue that the California city is now less an exception than an archetype. In fact, they say, the future of urbanism looks a lot like Los Angeles."

"[Disney's gated community] Celebration [...] has the pretense of a social experiment--one that seriously suggests we can escape urban woes by retreating into a sanitized, white bread version of America that never really existed in the first place."

"What went wrong with a 1988 park by the late Dan Kiley, and what can we learn from its imminent demolition?" (Via David Sucher.)

Temanummer om stadsplanering.

"Orsaken till att många går vilse i förorternas miljonprogram är de långa avstånden mellan gator och hus, visar ny avhandling." (Via Håkan Kjellerstrand.)

William Tozier picks up on W. A. Blaze's post "Pattern Navigation".

"Drive around any populated space, USA and you navigate not by landmark but by pattern. Radio Shack doesn't define the location, but a Radio Shack, Baja Fresh, Noah's Bagels sequence just might." (Via Matt Jones.)

"The [modern] architect designs buildings, usually object buildings. The traditional urban designer designs the streets, squares and blocks that make the public realm."

"'There's a structure to cities, a 4/4 beat,' Walter Hood says. 'Designing is like improvisation, finding a sound for each place.'" (Via Dan Hill.)

"Fifty years ago, the mall was born. America would never be the same." (Via Arts & Letters.)