Lmst

#CharlieDuff

#CharlieDuff: “Jane Jacobs says great cities help strangers to feel like neighbors and fellow-citizens”

#CharlieDuff: “Cities are a technology for bringing large numbers of people together”

Finishing up #CharlieDuff #TheNorthAtlanticCities

“The freedom to move around - on foot, or on a bike, without the protective armor of a car - is the essence of a great #city. It is why a great city is as potent an image of freedom as a redwood forest or a sailboat.”

com over in most of the North Atlantic cities - even in some cities that think they is far from over in most of the North Atlantic cities - even in some cities that hink they have put it behind them - all of them are in better shape than they were forty years ago, and some of our cities have worked their way out of the Urban Crisis altogether. The key to success has turned out to be something that few city leaders in 1975 considered important: our cities have begun to recapture the residents they lost in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Millions of people are now choosing to live in cities even if they can afford to live in the suburbs. This is readily visible. Hundreds of miles of old row houses have been restored, and the tallest skyscrapers in many North Atlantic cities are residential. And our thinking about cities has evolved to fit our new facts. No one still thinks that a city can survive and prosper if it is merely a job base surrounded by slums and suburbs. Today, in fact, our most popular cities worry that they may be too popular, and thus too expensive for their people. In the process of rediscovering and rebuilding our cities, we have learned, often unconsciously, to measure urban success by whether we can walk for miles and be in good, safe, satisfying urban environments every step of the way. And that is right.

“There should be a monument to the first person who ever came home from a full day's work and cooked dinner. “

#CharlieDuff on the rise of #apartments

minions Of omels was opens dos as da apartments. lone apartment revolution came, not from architecture, but from changes in codine. This had been a full- time job since the dawn of time, and it had never been possible for g employed person to live alone. Wives and servants had spent many hours over a ho stove unmarried people had lived with their parents or their employers, or boarded with another family, or shared the cost of a cook in a boarding house. Gas stoves and prepared foods changed all that at the beginning of the twentieth century. There should be a monument to the first person who ever came home from a full day's work and cooked dinner.

This provoked a real estate crisis in the North Atlantic cities. No one wanted to live in a boarding house or a lodging house any more, but every row of large houses had at least one of them, most of them presided over by widows like Sherlock Holmes's

“If you think of cities as world of art — and this book has probably mystified you if you do not…”

#CharlieDuff

.if you think will also appreciate a triumph of an aesthetic kind in the Not sent vou do not - you will also appreciate a triumph of an aesthetie Kind in the Not Alar Sites at the end of the nineteenth century. Americans invented a kind of building as expressed, beautifully and clearly, the reality of a commercial city. Just as Dutch burghers in the 17th century had made family reality beautiful by turing be rattletrap medieval row house into capital-A architecture with durable material, » American businessmen in the late 19th century made business reality grand by devising the skyscraper. What does this mean? Think of ancient Athens. Anyone who approached Athens could see the Acropolis, a temple-crowned citadel, from far off and could surmise that Athens was a city whose central concerns were worship and warfare. Anyone who approached a medieval town, with a castle at the top and a church or cathedral nearby, could hear the same message in a different language. The builders of ancient and medieval cities found ways to proclaim the realities of their societies truthfully and beautifully... Before the skyscraper, the builders of merchant could not do this. They could build beautiful buildings and beautiful streets, but they couldn’t shape a skyline that was both compelling and truthful. The cathedral domes thatrishut Florence and London are compelling, but they seem to say that these are sacred oils lie Rome or Jerusalem, when in fact they are cities of commerce and industry…

CHAPTER FIVE • 189 The New York Skyline c. 1910.

#Science as the institutionalization of #discontent

#CharlieDuff: “new scientific institutes and universities… created in every city a culture that encourage scientists to look for new problems, to solve them through experiment and teamwork, and to train the next generation of discontented experts”

I love the phrase #DiscontentedExperts

“The #rowhouse was the sign that a place was a #city, or aspired to become one, in the long 18th century. It was what the skyscraper became in the 20th century.”

#CharlieDuff #TheNorthAtlanticCities

“Pre-conditions, however, are not actions”

#CharlieDuff #TheNorthAtlanticCities @sociology

I'm quite enjoying #CharlieDuff's book #TheNorthAtlanticCities and suddenly realizing he is a neighbor in #Baltimore

He also helps run #JubileeBaltimore https://jubileebaltimore.org

#Duff makes a compelling case that the #rowhome aesthetic I love was perfected in the Netherlands in the 1600s--noting how contemporary these two paintings look

De Gouden Bocht in de Herengracht in Amsterdam vanuit het westen
Gerrit Berckheyde1672

source: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/de-gouden-bocht-in-de-herengracht-in-amsterdam-vanuit-het-westen/BAFnwxUCzX-XVg?hl=en

The Little Street (Het Straatje) is a painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Street

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