Creating Sustainable Cities, One Neighborhood At A Time

Prof. Michael Sorkin believes that "the recovery of the human scale of urban interaction" is essential for the creation of sustainable cities. "We know how to do this," he says from his office in New York, "but under pressure from developers, public officials and architects of shrivelled imagination, it is something we fail to celebrate and demand." Prof. Sorkin moved into the relatively recent academic discipline of urban design because the architecture profession has failed to effectively tackle "the vapid suburbanisation of the planet as part of a more general decline in the politics of compassion and responsibility". The more traditional discipline of urban planning has also failed to do much more "than produce mechanical, alienating, dreary cities that lack the vitality of less regulated, more spontaneous places".

Thanks to Zvi Leve