Research
Making and Living in Cortile delle Camelie
We are in the hot spot of Naples, a town universally known for its wonderful harmony between physis and polis. Naples is a unique city, what the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte describes as “the other Europe. The one who Descartes’ reasons can’t penetrate.” And on a hill behind the Spanish Quarter we can admire the […] read more
Newark—on Heterogenesis of Urban Decay
I. 1947, A “Day of Reckoning”—The Central Planning Board of the City of Newark, New Jersey Addresses the Citizens of Newark[1] Newark’s 1947 Master Plan, completed after a decade of population decline (1930–1940) and a decrease in real estate value, noted a “downward trend” that “must be arrested by undertaking privately financed large scale re-building […] read more
Sara Bissen
Call for Papers: Biophilic Design and Architecture
by Antonio Caperna The Journal of Biourbanism (JBU) is an open peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, international online journal, and the official journal of the International Society of Biourbanism (ISB). Picking up a word coined by Edward Wilson, we define biophilic that kind of architecture, which is capable to supply our inborn need of connection to life and […] read more
Antonio Caperna
1067 PacificPeople—the Sociality of Weeds
by Sara Bissen Interview with Andrea Haenggi I walked into the Scenic Superficial Garage Resort at 1067 Pacific Street in Brooklyn on a hot, dusty day in early September 2013. The place was a raw urban prairie with a garage at the far end. Looking around, I noticed a tent next to a rusted corrugated […] read more
Sara Bissen
Education
Healing the Neoliberal Urban Cancer: The 53rd IMCL Conference.
by Stefano Serafini Following the theme of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato si’, the 53rd International Making Cities Livable Conference, on Caring for Our Common Home: Sustainable, Healthy, Just Cities and Settlements will take place at the Pontificia Università Urbaniana, in Vatican City, June 13-17. Neoliberal urban development is cancerous, killing a city’s social, economic and […] read more
Stefano Serafini
Making the Garden
by Christopher Alexander It has taken me almost fifty years to understand fully that there is a necessary connection between God and architecture, and that this connection is, in part, empirically verifiable. Further, I have come to the view that the sacredness of the physical world—and the potential of the physical world for sacredness—provides a […] read more
Christopher Alexander
