TODO: Should draw inspiration from my city rankings. Also super excited to visit Japan to get more ideas. (Check out Emergent Tokyo for more on this.)
Think I have a maybe odd conception of urban planning as a “practical art”. Even though gorgeous architecture is awe-inspiring, a city is ultimately measured in how it allows the humans residing there to thrive. In a way, a good city is the one you don’t notice. The one that allows humans to do their thing and create, it’s a canvas really.
TLDraw has been getting a lot of attention because it is an online canvas that gets out of your way and lets you do magical things. That is what good urban planning does.
The primary question I truly care about in Urban Design in how do we create cities that allow for kids from 10 - 100 to feel a sense of autonomy. You shouldn’t be trapped until you can get a car; that is genuinely such an alien way of living that we’ve just grown used to. Kids should not just have freedom, but be able to exercise it to go travel and live their life and explore their interests.
I don’t remember exactly which episode, but I saw French kids riding the train by themselves on the show Jet Lag. I think the way it works in France is that they have some relative that comes and picks them up at the stop, but the fact they can travel on the train alone with other kids is amazing. Perhaps this is in relation to education, but this idea that kids should learn to act mature and “grow up” while we still treat them as below that is ridiculous. If you expect them to take responsibility and learn to take matters into their own hands, you have to give them the opportunities to do that.
Questions
- How can we make our towns more walkable?
- How do you make public transport more appealing?
- How do we design cities/spaces which encourage the formation of cohesive communities?
- How can you apply the principles of good design to cities? What does an “intuitive” city mean?
Bibliography
- Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
- Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.