Aldo Rossi infill on broadway NYC

This is a nice infill by the late Aldo Rossi.  Restrained but still individual and certainly not overshadowed by adjoining buildings.

From the Context\Contrast exhibition: Scholastic Building, 557 Broadway, SoHo, by Aldo Rossi with Gensler Associates, 1996-2001. Image by Elizabeth Felicella (source: http://www.wallpaper.com/gallery/architecture/new-york-architecture-week/17051411/22275)

Aldo Rossi

This is the Bonnefantan Museum in Maastrict, NL by Aldo Rossi.  Something really nice and simple yet inventive, quirky but respectful...

eclectic post modern???

I came across this building today on a listserv... sourced from another list.   Anyway, what a great building.  No idea where it is, or who designed it!

In the interests of the common good

When in need of the higher moral ground, or a superiority judgement, you just can't beat invoking 'The Common Good'.  The 'Common Good' is without doubt a good thing.  But are we as planners uniquely privilged to act in its interest, let alone credibly understand what the Common Good is?  Do our cities and towns abound with evidence of 'Common Good' planning?

The Common Good is a profoundly philosophical challenge and dilemma.  To have a proper understanding of the common good, its probably best to start with Plato and work your way up through Marx and Lefebvre.  Issues of equality are matters of government policy not philosophy or law.  There is a profound difference between invoking a policy (i.e. give us 10% of your houses because we don't build any) to claiming you act in the common good.  Those in Council's have a  very limited mandate (local Councillors) or no mandate (officers and administrators) to act in the public good, other than the fact that the government pays them (they are therefore more responsible to government (and their pay cheque) than the common good).  No less, the consultant is responsible to their client and (potential) next pay cheque.

David Harvey in his brilliant and provocative book 'Rebel Cities' addresses the concept of an Urban Commons in some detail.

"... Much of the corruption that attaches to urban politics relates to how public investments are allocated to produce something that looks like a common but which promotes gains in private asset values for privileged property owners.  The distinction betweeen urban public goods and urban commons is both fluid and dangerously porous.  How often are developmental projects subsidized by the state in the name of the common interest when the true beneficiaries are a few landholders, financiers, and developers?"

The point is that no decision is completely a-political.  Planning is highly political.  Developers arn't always the bad guys just as planners arn't always the good guy.  There is no reason a Common Good can't be economic just much as environmental or cultural.

The Common Good is a catch-phrase just like Sustainable Development that is utilised to give an impression of superiority.  By saying you act in the Common Good doesn't mean you do, and chances are you don't!

More Portoghesi images. If only post-modern archiecture had followed this path...

Paolo Portoghesi's wonderful interior of the Moschea Mosque, Rome

A rush and a push and the land we stand on is ours

Our view of the city can often become sanitized. A vision of cappuccino culture servicing the needs of a consumer society that engages easily between homesome suburb and edgy/artistic city streets. However, sometimes we are reminded that the city is also a formation of taught tension and uneasy alliances that on occasion breaks down in a very dramatic way. And it does explode ... very frequently. The recent unrest in Istanbul and subsequently cities throughout cities reminds that in reality cities are a very uneasy peace. It is interesting that we have seen this explode in London and Istanbul in the last 3 three years - two world cities growing in the face of recession, and feeding off immigrants from former empires. In recent days Detroit has basically gone bust - harking back to New York's flirtation with the financial abyss 40 years ago. These cycles are shocking but at the same time so predictable. So it is only right to quote The Smiths from Strangeways here we come, which echoed the Clash's London Calling from 8 years earlier and in turn to evoke Henri Lefebvre's The Urban Revolution. This incredible essay by David Harvey 'The Right to the city' provides a persuasive thesis that the urbanisation process from Haussman's Paris to Bloomberg's New York are inextricably linked to economic and political power. Istanbul's summer reminds that sometimes the fight for the city, and public space is violent and instantaneous. Because, lest we get too comfortable, we need to be reminded at all times that smart cities are not about technology, but about equality, access to opportunity rather than opportunism. A smart city is a place of enabling networks and transparency.