Design in the Margin: Urban Voids

摘要

The days of Robert Moses and Edmund Bacon are gone. Although Bacon's Design of Cities lives on in graduate syllabi and Moses is enjoying a reevaluation in New York this year (a kinder, gentler oligarch?), the idea of a master planner is anachronistic. Large scale, urban projects are planned and executed by committee, only by the mercy of available funding. To accomplish anything on an urban scale today, persuasion trumps power and a full-court policy press is suicide. The most compelling urban proposals are no longer about force-feeding a party line, but about ideas from the margins.