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Category: The next city: food
Six Essays. #1: Restraint
This is the first of six posts that will comprise Six Memos for the Next Architecture. The six memos are titled Restraint, Simplicity, Solidity, Circumstance, Fluency, and Durability. "Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize … Continue reading Six Essays. #1: Restraint
Artes Perditae
Artes Perditae is Latin for lost arts. And now it is time for us to find, recall or unearth as many lost arts as we can. We are going to need them. Why? Because as Paul Gilding tells us in his book "The Great Disruption": "We've been borrowing from the future, and the debt has … Continue reading Artes Perditae
Word on the Street
Recently we got to talking about street scenes common when we were kids, and friend and neighbor Roger Brown told me about trucks like this: In my neighborhood just north of Chicago we never had a grocery truck, though I am sure it would have done well. Or would do well - more about that … Continue reading Word on the Street
City Punches Time Clock
These last twelve months, as all the world has struggled with the pandemic, more people everywhere are – at last – starting to realize that our health, our environment, our climate, and our lives in cities are all in need of reevaluating, rethinking, and transformation. And it’s an urgent matter of time. Time is emerging … Continue reading City Punches Time Clock
The Quiet City, The Future City
"Maybe the future is bad. But there's a future beyond that, right?" Yuno Gasa. First there is the city that we have constructed. Next is the city of the present, a quiet city, a city of stillness, anxiety and waiting. As we are confining ourselves indoors, we ask ourselves about life in our present cities. … Continue reading The Quiet City, The Future City
The Public Realm Reclaimed – At Last
Rochester's public realm: reclaimed during a pandemic. Image by Maria Furgiuele And Chicago's, in Ravenswood. Image by Jim Peters In the end, my years-long campaign to alter the presence of the automobile in our cities has always had two underlying and perhaps not very well hidden objectives. First has been a desire to reclaim and … Continue reading The Public Realm Reclaimed – At Last
Our Grid of Streets, Blocks, and Buildings, And at Last, No Cars….
First, a Prologue. We here at A Town Square are in a CDC quarantine: we had spent time in the wonderful cities of Madrid and Valencia, left at the last possible moment as the Spanish nation locked itself down, and arrived in the US to be told that we would be spending a couple of … Continue reading Our Grid of Streets, Blocks, and Buildings, And at Last, No Cars….
Present City, Future City: India
In the Old City, Ahmedabad. In February and March we spent a month visiting seven cities across India, from south to north, from west to east. Our time there was completely exceptional: invaluable, surprising, educational, revealing, depressing, infuriating, eye-opening and more. I continue to reflect on those days, and it has taken me until now … Continue reading Present City, Future City: India
Front Street – before and after
With as little commentary as possible, here are two views of our city. First, a view from the 1950s or 1960s. Downtown Rochester. Main Street at the bottom of the image, the Genesee River, and Front and Water Streets on either side of the waterfront, running north and south. And the same view in 2016. … Continue reading Front Street – before and after
A Town Square 