Monday 22 December 2008

Cities, Design and Evolution

I mentioned this book, Cities, Design & Evolution, briefly in the comments section of my last post. You can probably guess what it is about from the title. I haven't read it yet - it is an academic text book - but from skimming the first and last chapters it looks interesting. The author sets up the premise of the design of items being generally seen as a good thing, and therefore the design of cities is unique in the field of human endeavour, as actually being worse the more designed they are. I am looking forward to reading the author developing this argument - I suspect it resolves around cities being allowed instead to evolve.

The reason I mentioned it is because it contains some of my pictures of Glasgow.

Here's one of my loveofscotland.com pictures in the book:

2 comments:

Billy said...

I thought most cities developed haphazardly from one or mor nucleus

Robert Craig said...

They've been designed to a greater or lesser extent since the 17th century (earlier in the likes of Italy). Some entire cities in the last century came from one pen - Brasilia, Canberra, Cumbernauld. It just seems haphazard due to the passage of time.