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David Sucher, from Seattle, Washington, is author of the book
City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village. The
book shows examples of small things — City Comforts — that
make urban life pleasant: places where people can meet,
methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art
that infuses personality into locations and makes them into
places. Many of these small details are so obvious as to be
invisible.
At a time when Indianapolis is seeing tremendous investment
in its urban core and cultural districts, as well as in
urban-style developments around its fringes, Sucher will offer
his observations on what it really takes to create a dynamic
urban village.
If you're interested in urban neighborhoods, cultural
districts, design and planning, development, new urbanism, or
just curious about what makes a great place for people, you'll
be interested in what David Sucher brings.
For more information about City Comforts, visit
www.citycomforts.com.
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Simple Patterns, Simple Details
Our purpose is to help make our urban civilization
more...well...civilized. By and large our cities lack comfort
and grace. Oh, they have their bright spots — and there is
lots of good work being done — but overall it's pretty dreary.
The 'theory' of this book is that we don't pay attention to
the small details of cities that really make the difference in
our comfort. We spend a lot of time planning, a lot of time
thinking about how wonderful it could all be. But we don't
spend a whole lot of effort dealing with the thousands of
small details that make up our daily experience. We are great
on large-scale strategy and a bit inept at tactics.
There are many people all across the world who see both the
poverty of our urban environments and see a way to evolve out
of it. Speaking loosely, this approach can be called 'the new
urbanism.' (I say loosely because there are many threads to
this emerging urban tapestry and some pull in different
directions. But they are all tied together by the desire to
create cities built to human scale, where people can walk and
where there is a sense of community.)
The simple patterns and simple details shown in City Comforts
are not any panacea but they provide a framework for judging
new construction, for separating the simple but crucial
patterns from the trivial matters of style. This simple
framework asks us to examine a very few elements of the urban
landscape but it will go a long way to improve our cities. |
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