Quote for the Day

I grow tired of mindless contrarianism, the kind that says we must pay attention to this but no longer that. I prefer my contrary opinions of the nihilistically ironic or at least open-minded sort. With that said, while doing some research I came across another Lewis Mumford quote, that rightly encapsulated the modern transportation mindset:

In the more urbanized parts of America, electric transportation, often on its own private right-of-way,... achieved far higher rates of speed than the present motor bus (ed: or truck regarding shipping freight). Far from supplementing public rail transportation, the private motor car became largely a clumsy substitute for it. Instead of maintaining a complex transportation system, offering alternative choices of route and speed to fit the occasion, the new suburban sprawl has become abjectly dependent upon a single-form, the private motor car, whose extension has devoured the one commodity the suburb could rightly boast: space.

Whilst the suburb served only a favored minority [having become]...now a mass movement, it tends to destroy the value of both environments (downtowns and suburbs) without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values...With the destruction of walking distances has gone the destruction of walking as a normal means of human circulation: the motor car has made it unsafe and the extension of the suburb has made it impossible.

~Lewis Mumford, 1961.

Quote for the Day

From a great article at the Atlantic on the inevitability of gentrification and the nostalgists who either lament or fight it. Things either get better or they get worse...and investment alone without self-aware design is no guarantee which direction it will nudge the inertia:

The same processes created—and, as Sorkin and Zukin would have it, destroyed—contemporary SoHo, Tribeca, and the East Village. In their analyses of each, it’s clear that they pine for—and mistake as susceptible to preservation—the same sort of transitional moment Jacobs evokes in Death and Life, when an architecturally interesting enclave holds in ephemeral balance the emerging and the residual.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to positive or negative magnetic forces within the city. If an element of the urban puzzle are quite literally repulsive, either redesign it to be more humane and integral to the place or remove it altogether, and the flexibility to allow the processes to occur within a framework that encourages positive urban experience and functionality.

I, for one, have no problem whatsoever with Manhattan and other parts of NYC trending upward in price. It means a restoration to proper land valuation where land and space is worth the most in the heart of the city, where urban metabolism is at its greatest.

Thought for the Day

In this time of what Richard Florida calls "reset" and I might call repurposing, here are the words of who else, but the master of ceremonies and freak shows alike, PT Barnum:

Every man's occupation should be beneficial to his fellow-man as well as profitable to himself. All else is vanity and folly. We cannot all see alike, but we can all do good."

Are you pushing paper or lighting the fires of your own interests and desires? Are you helping to lift your fellow man? Are you advancing civilization?

Pursue your dreams.