This study engages the planning and urban design literature as well as social theory to develop a nuanced understanding of issues related to neighborhood form and sense of community. The study analyzes the meaning of community from economic, social, and cultural perspectives. It contextualizes the New Urbanism use of physical design as a subtext for community within a broader theoretical contex...

My interest in the relationship between fear and city building was sparked while doing research on the French new town of Jouy-leMoutier 15 years ago. This new town was an experiment in neotraditional urbanism (or the ‘new urbanism’), an effort to build a new town which looks and functions something like an old town. I wanted to discover whether or not this was a good strategy for city building...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

In the eighties, as Head of Urban Planning of Barcelona City Council, upon the restoration of democracy and having, as director, effected an unprecedented reshuffle at the Barcelona School of Architecture, Oriol Bohigas brought about a Copernican shift in designing and understanding public space in the city of Barcelona. That Urbanism took the form of remodeling, the shift from plan to project,...

Pressures for urban redevelopment are intensifying in all large cities. A new logic for urban development is required – green urbanism – that provides a spatial framework for directing population and investment inwards to brownfields and greyfields precincts, rather than outwards to the greenfields. This represents both a major opportunity and a major challenge for city planners in pluralist li...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...