Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann
25: Urban Design Now
The radical critique of current American urban design practice articulated here may be as potent and important as the radical critique of Modernist practice articulated and worked through from the early 1960s (with Jane Jacobs) through the early 1980s (with Postmodernism). This time it is a radical critique of the late and stale fruits of that earlier critique. Just as late Modernism calcified into dogmatism and second rate production–inhuman corporate and public housing towers, so too has the humanist reaction against Modernism devolved into lifelessness and shallow formula. This devolution and the resulting need for a radical change of direction is here expressed with the power of a long submerged awareness at last coming to the surface. The realization in these pages is that our hope for revitalized urbanism and a more fulfilling and meaningful city life through a return to the patterns, texture, look, and scale of certain pre-20th-century cities and through a focus on yuppie lifestyles has created innumerable delusions and falsities.
Articles
Table of Contents
Editors' Letter
Cappuccino Urbanism, and Beyond
William S. Saunders
Essay
“Facts on the Ground” Urbanism from Mid-Road to Ditch
Michelle Provoost, Wouter Vanstiphout
Beyond Centers, “Fabric,” and the Culture of Congestion: Urban Design as a Metropolitan Enterprise
Richard M. Sommer
Defining the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches
Joan Busquets
Designing the Postmetropolis
Edward W. Soja
Dispatch from the Subdivision Archipelago and Dubai…Is Not Yet
Ahmed Kanna, Rodolfo Machado
The End(s) of Urban Design
Michael Sorkin
The Morals of Modernist Minimalism: A Provocation
Thomas Spector
The Upside of Gentrification
Matthew J. Kiefer
Toward a Well-Tempered Digital Design: The Architecture of Reiser + Umemoto
Antoine Picon
Urban Design after Battery Park City: Opportunities for Variety and Vitality in Large-Scale Urban Real-Estate Development
Timothy Love
Urban Design Now: A Discussion
Alex Krieger, Dennis Pieprz, Farshid Moussavi, Julia Czerniak, Margaret Crawford, Matthew Urbanski, Paul Goldberger, Rodolfo Machado, William S. Saunders
Review
A Field Guide to Sprawl by Dolores Hayden and Jim Wark
Andrew Ross
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions by Fredric Jameson
Reinhold Martin
Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann
Alex Krieger
The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 by Jon A. Peterson
Robert Fishman