Welcome to flaneuring, a newsletter featuring new resources on urban & beyond, insights, and photography.
an insight
Today, it might seem obvious that tall towers surrounded by manicured lawns don’t make for great neighborhoods. But in the 1930s, they looked like a cure: a clean solution to the dirt and disease of crowded cities. Green space for everyone. Sunshine in every window. A modern life, elevated.
It was all good intentions. As Jan Gehl wrote in Life Between Buildings:
“Dwellings were to have light, air, sun, and ventilation, and the residents were to be assured access to open spaces. The requirements for detached buildings oriented toward the sun and not, as they had been previously, toward the street, and the requirement for separation of residential and work areas were formulated during this period in order to assure the individual healthy living conditions and to distribute the physical benefits more fairly.”
In hindsight, it’s easy to see the blind spot: in their goal to fight congestion, planners overlooked the psychological importance of scale and transition. Small public and semi-public spaces (courtyards, community gardens, porches, stoops…) create the subtle threads of connection that hold a neighborhood together.
The question is: what are we taking for granted now?
new resource
In Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander first argues that lasting, well-adapted forms grow step by step — like in traditional cultures — whereas modern designers, relying on fixed preconceptions, often create arbitrary, ill-fitting results.
Alexander then presents a clearer path: break any complex problem into smaller “subsystems”, generate fresh concepts from each subproblem’s own structure, and recombine them to produce a coherent, context-sensitive design.
a snapshot
