If you want to learn about cities today, take a long walk along rural trails and through historic cities and towns. All photos by Charles R. Wolfe After 12 days of walking the Portuguese Camino, the importance of many urban planning and development concepts — from the urban-to-rural Transect to balanced growth — became abundantly […]
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[Republished five years after original posting, upon today’s visit to Edinburgh from London. This post was named The Guardian Cities‘ web article of the week in early March, 2014.] Going forward, let’s not discount the influence of history’s recurring themes in how we redevelop the urban realm. So many discussions […]
The changing scale of Póvoa do Varzim On Easter Sunday, in Póvoa do Varzim, Portugal, a longtime resident helped us find an open store on an evening that almost everything was closed. His pride in his city was contagious – 40 years, born and bred – an old fashioned Good Samaritan […]
The role of historic preservation — or “heritage” as it’s often termed overseas — is a conundrum faced regularly in the planning and development world. In rapidly changing cities with redevelopment incentives, “what to save” is front-page news, and the loss of special places is forever memorialized. I’ve often advocated getting down to the […]
Melbourne, Australia, by the author. Island Press first published an e-book version of the book, Urbanism Without Effort, in 2013, and a released a revised, paperback version last week. This book set the stage for my later book, Seeing the Better City, which was designed to implement my ideas about how […]
Looking forward to 2019, Chuck Wolfe reflects on how time living in London — and exposure to many other places during 2018 — has highlighted how the physical shell of the old often frames today’s sociocultural realities around the world. Isleworth, Hounslow, London My time living in London for the last year — as well as exposure […]
Generally speaking, the description of any Utopia that involves many details is apt to be an unconvincing way to present a principle which can be applied effectively in practice with immense flexibility as to details… (Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to Henry James, July 10, 1924, Papers, Regional Plan Association, Cornell […]
More so than public squares — which require a conscious set-aside of assembled space — corners naturally result from crossroads, the time-honored, elemental feature of travel between places. A corner in Karatu, Tanzania The corner is the central place of urban life. Ancient, grid-based Roman military towns, or castra, were planned around crossroads and their corners. […]
In Gordon Cullen’s epic early-1960s work, The Concise Townscape, he described the visual experience of townscape views through an emphasis on “serial vision,” and on present and emerging views that become revelation while moving from place to place. More than Edmund Bacon, who focused his Design of Cities on similar […]