Urbanism
Stuff about cities
2014-12-25 — 2025-02-17
Wherein urban order is surveyed, and debates from smart‑city surveillance to charter‑city experiments are presented, while city scaling laws linking population to energy use are examined.
1 Ideas to discuss
2 Urban governance and innovation
Próspera a high-profile front-runner
Critique of some parts of process and founders: Why Is the US Condemning Honduras For Fighting Corruption? – CEPR
Próspera City-Builders’ Network | Dework (intriguing! Get paid for doing units of work towards designing a novel city)
Samuel Hughes, Making architecture easy
Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius.
Sam Bowman on why housing still isn’t fixed and what would actually work
3 Scaling laws
The Urban Scaling Value system (L. M. A. Bettencourt 2013; L. M. Bettencourt and West 2010) is a theory of cities that suggests that various qualities of city (energy use, innovation rate…) scale in predictable ways with population. Methodological critique of the naive approach may be found in Cottineau et al. (2017).
There is much more (Arcaute et al. 2015; Balland et al. 2020; L. M. A. Bettencourt and Lobo 2016; Cottineau et al. 2017; Kühnert, Helbing, and West 2006; Leishman et al. 2021; Prieto Curiel, Cabrera-Arnau, and Bishop 2022; Rybski, Arcaute, and Batty 2019)
4 American homelessness and drugs
Leighton Woodhouse
Edward Onweso, Why Are Rich People So Obsessed With Proving US Cities Are Dystopian Hellholes?
5 Incoming
City Journal | Urban Affairs Magazine (I’m kinda fascinated that the HTML title brands this a “conservative” magazine)
Michael Batty’s interesting mathematical models:
- Batty’s review editorials in Environment and Planning B
Adam Greenfield calls out technocapitalist utopians and hence will not get you funded. a piece for the Guardian’s “Resilient Cities” project.
