Architecture & Built Environment
The scale above the building.
12 topics · 23 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Garden Cities of To-Morrow
Ebenezer Howard · 1898
A new kind of town, capped in size and ringed by permanent farmland, can combine the economic pull of the city with the health of the countryside if…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen
Camillo Sitte · 1889
Argues that irregular medieval squares and streets achieve an enclosure and visual harmony that the rigid geometric grids of modern city planning…
+15 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Measuring the Unmeasurable: Urban Design Qualities Related to Walkability
Reid Ewing & Susan Handy · 2009
Shows that qualities long treated as unmeasurable in urban design — a street's imageability, enclosure, human scale and transparency — can be…
+2 more at this level
12 of 23 works
Ebenezer Howard
A new kind of town, capped in size and ringed by permanent farmland, can combine the economic pull of the city with the health of the countryside if the increase in land value is captured for the community rather than the landlord.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJane Jacobs
Mixed uses, short blocks, aged buildings and dense foot traffic are what make a city street safe and alive, so the slum-clearance and superblock planning of postwar renewal was destroying the very disorder that made cities work.
Notes on this copyWilliam H. Whyte
Filmed, direct observation of how people actually use plazas shows that success is not about space or greenery but about sittable edges, sun, food and the simple presence of other people.
Notes on this copyCongress for the New Urbanism
Sets out the movement's founding principles, arguing that walkable neighbourhoods, mixed use and regional planning should replace sprawl as the default pattern of American development.
Notes on this copyCamillo Sitte
Argues that irregular medieval squares and streets achieve an enclosure and visual harmony that the rigid geometric grids of modern city planning destroy, and that planners should study old cities as artists, not just engineers.
Notes on this copyRaymond Unwin
A practical manual of civic design principles, street layout, density, open space, arguing good town planning is an art with its own aesthetic rules, not just an engineering or sanitary exercise.
Notes on this copyPatrick Geddes
Planning has to work from a prior survey of a regions geography, history and civic life, not from an abstract diagram imposed on a site, diagnosis before treatment applied to the city.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyUnited States Department of Commerce, Advisory Committee on Zoning
Provides a template statute letting any state legislature hand its municipalities the power to separate land uses by district, and nearly every zoning code in the United States still descends from the model it set out.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copySupreme Court of the United States
The US Supreme Court upheld municipal zoning as a valid use of the police power, ruling that separating land uses by district is a legitimate protection of public welfare rather than an unconstitutional taking.
United States Congress
Established federal funding for slum clearance and urban redevelopment alongside a national goal of decent housing for every American family, the legal basis for the postwar urban renewal programmes later criticised for destroying the neighbourhoods they cleared.
UN-Habitat
Nearly a billion people already live in slums, and the report argues that upgrading their homes and legalising their tenure works better than the clearance and relocation still favoured by many governments.
310 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyUN-Habitat
Documents growing inequality within cities worldwide and argues urban prosperity has to be measured by how its benefits are shared, not by aggregate growth alone.