New Cities/New Soviets

April 28, 2003

The Artificial Horizon


[Don Foley's pic from the Wired article]

I recently read this article in wired (via this post in postpolitics, which, in turn, I found through N.Z. Bear's ecosystem, which I was turned on to through my bud Jeremy's blog. Whew.).

It seems that building cities downwards is rapidly becoming cheaper than building them upwards. Gives new meaning to "sub-urban." Of course, Ken Yeang has been preaching this approach (with a much less quixotic bent) for years, most notably highlighted in the book Groundscrapers and Subscrapers.

Of course, you can also just look at the majority of highly concentrated, low cost building stock, like the tenement plain of the Lower East side, to see that this principle is already being applied. The "ground level" of any city is, after all, essentially arbitrary. We live in the age of the artificial horizon -- the real struggle is to make this new ground liveable.

Posted by Sam at April 28, 2003 09:14 PM

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