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Why Should We Care About Good Urbanism?
In a housing crisis, it’s easy to dismiss the aesthetics of buildings as superfluous “nice-to-haves” that are not really necessary. But new research by prominent researchers David Broockman, Chris...
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You’re Not Antisocial, But Your Neighborhood Might Be
Since the publication of Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community in 2000, a growing body of research has focused on the decline of civic and social engagement...
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What Japan Gets Right (A Partial List)
I’m not going to pretend that urbanism in Japan hasn’t been celebrated a million times over. But as I contemplate California, it’s clear that we haven’t learned any of the manifest lessons the island...
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In Marseille’s Cours Julien, Street Art Creates Dynamic Context
One of the best ways to discover a place is simply to get lost in it. Fortunately, this is easy to do in Marseille. Compared to Paris, the street patterns of Marseille seem indecipherable, lending the...
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Contemporary Architecture and the Modern City
O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they...
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Vivian Maier: Nanny With a Rolleiflex
Spread over two floors in the Fotografiska building in New York’s Flatiron District, the exhibition Vivian Maier: Unseen Work (which runs through September 29) reveals a trove of surprises. The late,...
View ArticleArchitecture Always Reflects the Values of Its Current Culture
What we build can be metaphoric—often intentionally, sometimes subliminally. But architecture is seldom the intentional commentary of architects, crafting symbolism; more often it is a direct...
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The Uneven—but Important—Legacy of Prince Charles, Architecture Critic
Hanging on my office wall is a framed letter from then-Prince Charles thanking me for attending his International Symposium on Traditional Urbanism in 2000. With it is a photograph of me presenting to...
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Encounters With Damian: Columbia University’s Homeless Neighbor
In the 1970s, I spent five years as a graduate student at Columbia University. The school has always meant a great deal to me, and in a speech at a graduate school award ceremony in 2022, I found...
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Braids by Jade: L.A. Street Art Through Two Lenses
Since the early 1990s, I have been photographing hand-painted murals and signs throughout South Central Los Angeles. My ongoing concern is to record these street images, reflections of the local...
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The Washington, D.C., Drawings of Dhiru Thadani
Every city needs someone to observe it, sketch it, master its history, and insist that its strengths be defended and reinforced. Sometimes the person who plays this role comes from the other side of...
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The 15-Minute City, Deconstructed
What is the 15-Minute City? It’s every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name. If a city’s old parts haven’t been destroyed in the past century, it’s...
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Our Top 10 Posts for 2022
Common Edge had its second best year in 2022, reaching nearly 250,000 readers. Thank you to everyone who visited the site, whether for the first time or the hundredth. And thank you to all of our...
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In His Plans for New York, Vornado’s Steven Roth Is Channeling Robert Moses
It is Robert Moses 101. Vornado’s plans for its “PENN District” development includes the demolition of 55 buildings (more than 40 of which are landmark eligible), the removal of 1296 businesses with...
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Practical Principles for Places Recovering From Disinvestment
Of the four types of recovery facing America cities and towns—disaster, sprawl, disinvestment, and the recovery of community for those fleeing climate change—the recovery of places from serious...
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Peanuts Urbanism: Charles Schulz’s Subtle Critique of Suburbia
Last Christmas, I came upon a Peanuts cartoon that has stuck with me ever since. The episode, from December 1963, depicts Charlie Brown searching for a place or item in his home on which to hang his...
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My 15-Minute City: Nové Město, Prague
Describing or delineating a 15-minute city in Prague is an interesting challenge, because it resonates with thoughts and impressions I initially had here, after arriving in late August 2021. At first,...
View ArticleIn Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings
Although it was originally published in 2019, this essay by Randy Nishimura, lightly updated, serves as a rebuttal of sorts to Duo Dickinson’s recent Common Edge piece,“The Architectural Pandemic of...
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Camilo José Vergara’s Pandemic Diary: Pizza in the Bronx
For the past two years I have been obsessively photographing the city, creating a pandemic diary, documenting the ways in which Covid has changed both our lives and the places we live. I follow people...
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What’s the Matter with American Cities?
For frequent travelers to Europe, it is frustrating to see the increasingly different urban conditions on the other side of the Atlantic. In Europe, cities are largely appreciated and embraced, and...
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