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How do you critique a city? What is city criticism, and why is it important?

2019-10-29T11:18:00-04:00

Criticism: Everyone in architecture experiences it regularly. The importance of this consistent facet of the profession provides ongoing possibilities for discourse and improvement. However, like other areas where criticism plays a necessary part of establishing a significant impression or progression within society, it’s not always easy to have others detract or contradict the ideas embodied by your work.

Colin Marshall of the Guardian brings up a specific category within criticism that has particular relevance today, "the city critic." Marshall argues, "In our increasingly urban world, perhaps city criticism should be recognized as distinct and necessary." So, where does "city criticism" differ from "architecture criticism," and why should it be recognized as an integral part of understanding the built environment?

Jane Jacobs. Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Marshall speaks with critics and editors alike to help further understand and decipher what this distinct subject of criticis...

Desire paths as urban 'civil disobedience'

2018-10-08T15:47:00-04:00

Desire paths have been described as illustrating “the tension between the native and the built environment and our relationship to them”. Because they often form in areas where there are no pavements, they can be seen to “indicate [the] yearning” of those wishing to walk, a way for “city dwellers to ‘write back’ to city planners, giving feedback with their feet”.

Ellie Violet Bramley pens an ode to "desire paths"—organically grown foot paths off the prescribed paved sidewalks; pedestrians' yearning for urban movement outside of the planned city order.

Example of an urban desire path getting paved in Chicago. Photo: Paul Sableman/Flickr.

A brief history of designing secure spaces

2018-04-10T15:44:00-04:00

Can design keep you safe from crime? Architects and urbanists have been making that claim since urban crime — or the threat of it — reached crisis proportions in the 1960s. [...] But with scant evidence to support those claims, at what cost do we build “defensible space”? Architectural historian Joy Knoblauch looks back at sixty years of attempts to secure space and asks whether safety lies in the design of the built environment, in our social structures, or in our heads.

Jane Jacobs makes an appearance in Amazon's newest hit, "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"

2018-01-05T12:36:00-05:00

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a charming, new series put out by Amazon. Written by Amy Sherman-Palladino of the early aughts hit Gilmore Girls, the show tells the story of a 1950s, Jewish upper-middle-class housewife, Miriam Maisel (played by Rachel Brosnahan), as she finds her way into stand-up comedy stardom after being unexpectedly left by her husband for his secretary. What ensues over the course of eight episodes, is the delightful, 2017-inspired transformation of her character, from a housewife to a career woman. Mrs. Maisel's routine is accidental, her first "act" occurring as a drunken rant that happens to be on stage after her husband's departure. But, it is her uninhibited, risqué takes and musings on being a mother and a woman that make both her standup and the show itself a pleasure to watch.

Mrs. Maisel's dive into the New York comedy scene leads her to new discoveries about the world off the stage as well. Set circa 1958, a time of many changes, one of the shows joys is...

Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses star in “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City” documentary, coming to U.S. theaters in April

2017-03-20T16:15:00-04:00

The historic feud between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is hitting the silver screen in “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”, a fairly new feature-length documentary directed by Matt Tyrnauer and produced by Robert Hammond (co-founder and executive director of NYC's Friends of the High Line). Following premieres at DOC NYC and the Toronto International Film Festival last year, “Citizen Jane” will be released in theaters and on demand in the U.S. on April 21.

Set in the 1950s and '60s in New York City, the film centers around Jane Jacobs' fight against Robert Moses' ruthless urban “renewal” schemes that targeted NYC's “slums” and its vital communities — a situation that many cities worldwide still face today. It also sheds light on European modernist ideals of architecture and urban design finding its place in the U.S., according to one film review.

“We realized that no one had done a film about Jane Jacobs,” Producer Robert Hammond said in a statement. “She came up with her own common s...

With Trump's Presidency dawning, the final Jane Jacobs work "Dark Age Ahead" wins new relevancy

2016-12-27T18:12:00-05:00

At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

"Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age."

Jan Gehl: "Never ask what the city can do for your building, always ask what your building can do for the city."

2016-05-25T20:18:00-04:00

I’m not so critical about New York, because they have this very firm grid-pattern. Even the newer buildings are lined up on good streets. If you stand in front of the Empire State Building, you can’t really guess how tall it is, because it meets the street in a friendly way. [...] It’s not so important how high the building is, or how much it looks like a perfume bottle, it’s more important how it interacts with the city.

How Jane Jacobs continues to be an influential force in city planning

2016-05-04T14:19:00-04:00

She would ask us to look at the consequences of these sub-economies for the city – for its people, its neighbourhoods, and the visual orders involved...Talking with Jacobs, it became clear that community battles were, for her, simply part of a wider inquiry as she sought to better understand, and develop concepts for, the role of cities in the economy.

And if you haven't already noticed it, there's a special Google Doodle celebrating Jacobs' 100th birthday.

Is Dubai the future of cities?

2013-12-09T20:39:00-05:00

To its critics—and even many of its fans—“culture” and “Dubai” barely belong in the same sentence. The city is perhaps the world’s most extreme example of a business-first, built-from-the-sand boomtown. But Shoufani and her fellow Poeticians have become a prime exhibit in a debate that has broken out with renewed vigor in the Arab world and among urban theorists worldwide...

What Jane Jacobs Got Wrong About Urban Economies

2012-12-05T14:49:00-05:00

To survive, a city or a region has to make money; it has to export more than it imports, in dollar terms. Cities that decline are on the losing side of this equation. So if you care about cities, which I do, it leads you to think about how they function as economic entities. It leads you to think about economics. I think this is what happened to Jane Jacobs, and why she ended up writing several books about economics after her seminal 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Living in Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park

2012-10-04T15:45:00-04:00

The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of my home is one reason why I’ve chosen to reside within a dense urban fabric. I am not a voyeur: I do not receive sexual satisfaction from watching the daily lives of others. But I do like to imagine the many meaningful “relationships” I have created with people that I will never meet or even recognize on the street.

When architect Melissa Dittmer moved from New York City to Detroit, her reaction was a "year-long panic attack." Where, she wondered, were the people? "Where was the density, the sense of connection with strangers?" But then Dittmer and her family bought a townhouse in Lafayette Park, the modernist development created in the early '60 by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell — a place where the design itself encourages "a shared sense of intimacy that fosters community." On Places, she writes about how the architecture and landscape design of Lafayette Park conspire to create a sense of ordered exhibitionism, in a chapter from the new book Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies.

Jane Jacobs compares Toronto & Montreal, 1969

2012-02-09T17:29:00-05:00

From CBC TV's "The Way It Is" program, circa 1969, urbanist and author Jane Jacobs compares late 1960s Toronto and Montreal on how they have been planned and built, while condemning major highways planned for GTO.