Throughout their history, cities have been comprised of many and varied uses, and quite often those uses found themselves self-segregated into districts, whether business, civic, residential or others.

This is the core concept of the case, and the concept that should drive the regulation of development and operation of cities, but it never really surfaced as an important issue in the various legal battles that have followed the Euclid decision. 

Walking crosstown in Manhattan is an exercise in passing through very long blocks, with much less change than the uptown trip.  Yes, it is the same physical distance, but it is a much longer mental distance.

By this time open space, a part of the city that we had previously thought of as public parks, became something entirely different.  It replaced parks as the defining green spaces within cities with a fairly consistent pattern of smaller buildings placed on a continuous green background.  Public parks were replaced by an almost infinite series of private yards…

A block is an area of privately owned land that is surrounded on all sides by public rights-of-way. No block perimeter shall exceed 1200 (pick your dimension) feet.

On the surface permeability seems like a perfectly logical attribute for a city, the ability for people to walk with as little obstruction as possible. More places to walk equals more walking, right? Wrong.

One of the most prevalent words used in discussions around the growth, or form, of cities is organic.

There is no great city in the world that isn’t made up of a highly connected network of streets. In fact this is the first thing that all great cities have in common: New York, London, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Beirut, Istanbul and on and on.

Driverless cars are going to radically transform the landscape of the city and suburb, but in exactly the opposite way most people believe. Instead of being the saviors of our cities, they will provide the justification for the retention and expansion of the 20th century suburban development model.

If we want cities that are great, or even good, there are only a few things (three, actually) that we need to do to allow this to happen. These three things won’t guarantee that a city will turn out great, but if these three things aren’t done, then it is guaranteed that we won’t have a great, or even a good, city (or town, or suburb, or village, or anything else that we populate collectively).

Name a great city that doesn’t have a tightly connected system of rights-of-way and small blocks.

I was at a project review yesterday for a very large project in Istanbul. It has a site that is about 2 kilometers by .5 kilometers (about 15 blocks long in NY terms, and longer than the historic peninsula in Istanbul is wide), so a fairly big project.

Historically infrastructure, utilities and resources have been planned through demand modeling that follows development projections. The typical cycle is one in which development is proposed, quanta of development is calculated, and resources are applied based on the per unit peak demand, including a margin of safety factor.

For 2500 years, at least, we have been planning cities that are incredibly sustainable.  Since the very first cities were planned (up until November 22, 1926), planned, or designed cities have had one very basic thing in common.

I was walking through London this weekend, heading towards the Bank tube station after passing through Liverpool Street station. Since I usually walk to Bank from the office, and this was a new route, I opened up my Google maps app as I was leaving the station.

There is a new phenomenon called the Airport City, or Aerotropolis. The idea behind these new developments is that there is a kind of ‘city’ that is developed around an airport, with particular uses and operations that both support the airport but also create an environment that might be more than a conventional logistics and business park.

I wrote this years ago for the 2012 transportation referendum in Georgia (mostly north Georgia). I see there is another vote coming up, so I figured I would send this back out, since it seems to still have resonance.