How to Make an Attractive City

Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

Alain de Botton explains how to make an attractive city:

Not too chaotic, not too ordered.
Visible life.
Compact.
Orientation and mystery.
Scale.
Make it local.

Posted in Urbanism | 4 Comments »

Comments

Zippy says:

January 29, 2015 at 6:47 pm

I’m sorry, but this guy seems like an insufferable jerk. Basically, “every city should look like the cities I like.”

I just want to punch his arrogant face after listening to this.
Toddy Cat says:

January 30, 2015 at 11:55 am

Can’t argue with that, Zippy. It’s typical of the “New Urbanists” — even when I agree with them about certain things, their elitist condescension drives me nuts. Soft-Core Stalinism at its worst.
Spandrell says:

January 30, 2015 at 1:52 pm

Punch the Stalinist. Right.

See, that’s why we can’t have nice things.

Enjoy your strip malls then.
Toddy Cat says:

January 31, 2015 at 11:31 am

Not everybody likes the same things, pal. Enjoy your holy “density”.

Richard Morchoe: The future of the surface navy, any surface navy is not another Midway. Think of a grand Houthi Navy. https://thelonghillinsti tute.substack.com/p/sink -the-navy
T. Beholder: If the facts don’t fit into Theory, so much worse for those facts. The confusion is caused by quasi-secular (or reverse hypocrite, per Chesterton) mimicry — adaptation of the Protestant theocratic power to “Separation of Church and State”. It’s 1 to 2 fig leaves thin, yet the superficial observers make a mistake of thinking about the elements of a theocracy trying to proselytize by any means as if they were elements of states trying to do some realpolitik. Or, mix up Rome and Vatican. Then...
Jim: Elon Musk: “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can [fuck] and get online for school and do good peaceful things…” Has there ever been a nigga more real than this?
T. Beholder: Jim says: If every family were assigned a parcel of land today you would cry SOCIALISM or COMMUNISM or some other such nonsense because embedded deep and immutable in your ideological construct You seem to be arguing with your imagination. Did you win? But if you want to get really particular about it, you could say that Thanksgiving began with the English Reformation and grew into the holiday I described in North America, an ethnocultural implicit celebration by the American Anglo...
Roo_ster: Echoes of Jerry Pournell and his sci-fi buds from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Jim: Heheh.
Phileas_Frogg: …or rather, they are his, “Chosen People?”
Phileas_Frogg: Capitalism- A cult predicated on the fanciful notion that Private Property is God and Banker’s are his priests.
Jim: *whereto reasonably capable
Jim: Here’s a real policy proposal derivative of your real-life example of Governor William Bradford, “English Puritan Separatist originally from the West Riding of Yorkshire in Northern England”, émigré to the Plymouth Colony aboard the Mayflower: Let there be an office whereto reasonable capable young men shall fill out and send an application form for the purpose of obtaining arable land. The land will simply be reassigned, with the stroke of a pen, from its current...
Jim: “Socialism” and “capitalism” are hot-button words from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. From your own citation: “At length, after much debate of things, the Governor … gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.” If every family were assigned a parcel of land today you would cry...
Bob Sykes: In 1972. the US agreed that Taiwan was the 23rd province of China; that is the essence of the One China policy. That was done to separate China from the Soviet Union. It was a smart policy, and it worked to our very great advantage. Nowadays, our lunatic neocons, not satisfied with wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, Yemen…, want wars in the China Seas, Georgia, Serbia… Marshall does not seem to realize the deep malaise and corruption that...
Gaikokumaniakku: “I didn’t come here to be bored.” Where do you usually go to be bored? I really want to get bored and I need help finding some really boring sites to visit.
T. Beholder: (there weren’t both IN that one) I enjoy a humble shitpost, it must be admitted, but the truth really is… Not what the actual participants plainly admitted? Here’s a less-humble shitpost by Itchy Bacca, compiling more (from this article and others).
Jim: I enjoy a humble shitpost, it must be admitted, but the truth really is that Thanksgiving really is a naked celebration of the White Anglo Native American’s bounty in North America taken and held by greater commitment and superior virtue. Anything else is ethnocultural erasure.
Phileas Frogg: The Manson murders are just another shuffling intimation at, “The Man Behind the Curtain,” so to speak, which are always fascinating when viewed beyond the mere brute facts of the case and placed in that context. I suppose one could consider it boring for anyone who’s already pulled the curtain back and taken a gander, but I still appreciate adding to the tally of the sheer number of milestones.
Michael van der Riet: The Manson murders are fundamentally boring and I didn’t come here to be bored.
T. Beholder: Finders and their keepers. So “mystery solved”, yes. The curiously persistent details spammed around and laughingtrack.jpg were due to focused application of smoke and mirrors.
T. Beholder: Quotes from the actual participants suffice, to be honest. William Bradford and Ralph Hamor summarized it well enough in The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving: The Triumph of Capitalism over Collectivism.
Jim: Thanksgiving is the wholesome, inclusive day that many tawny Central, Southern, and Eastern European wannabes join all white British Isles-descended Americans in celebration of our glorious supremacy in the total war of all against all that was the North American continent before the Englishman sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to dominate the Indian savage and make this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus. Observations Concerning the Increase of...

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How to Make an Attractive City

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