Sustaining Place

The Practical Confessions of an Urbanist Pilgrim

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…

Why Urban History [Still] Matters

[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…

Of City Change and a Stranger

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…

A Good Read for Planners and Peers: Why Old Places Matter

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…

Pondering the ‘Without Effort’ City

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…

On Different Ways to See a Place

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…

Urban Solutions: Are We Chasing Utopia?

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…

The Baselines of Public Space? Corners.

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…

An Expatriate’s Primer on an Urban View

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…

About Perceptions of Place

As a so-called expatriate, I’ve been enmeshed in the task of learning to relate to new surroundings. I have two recent guideposts, Plamen and Pope.…