Welcome to flaneuring, a newsletter featuring new resources on urban & beyond, insights, and photography.
new resource
Soft City by David Sim is a visual, down-to-earth guide to building cities that feel good to live in — walkable, cozy, and tailored to human scale. Instead of long commutes and isolated buildings, Sim shows how thoughtful design can create dense but comfortable neighborhoods full of life and connection.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“The key difference between standard of living and quality of life, as I see it, is that standard of living comes down to the money we have and how we spend it, whereas quality of life is about the time we have and how we spend it. One is more about quantity; the other is more about quality. One is about stuff, and the other is about experience. Rather than finding ways of affording and accommodating more things into our lives, we might instead consider solutions to give us better ways of spending our precious time, lightening our load in life rather than burdening it, and helping change the daily stresses and conflicts of working, raising children, staying fit, shopping, running a home, and dealing with neighbors into everyday pleasures.”
snapshots
Warm weather, open windows, blurred edges.
new url + new website
You might’ve noticed the website has a new home: urbanandbeyond.com.
The old name, learnurbandesign.com, felt a bit too on-the-nose. Maybe even a little pretentious.
The new name gives me more flexibility to branch out into architecture, psychology, or whatever else I can argue is technically related ;)
I’ve also been redesigning the site so it’s easier to navigate. Now you’ll find proper categories like “authors” and “cities”, instead of everything lumped under vague tags. It’s still a work in progress, but if you have any feedback (or spot a broken link or typo), just reply to this email to let me know. I’d really appreciate it.