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In 1995, renowned urban scholar and expert David Rusk wrote   Baltimore Unbound , a booklet in which he declared Baltimore to be "beyond a point of no return" (along with 33 other American cities).  His assessment was based on the same theory as his book Cities without Suburbs, namely that cities that can't grow and expand through annexation are doomed.  Baltimore's last annexation happened in 1918 and ever since it was an   inelastic city.   So there you go: surrounded by affluent and growing suburbs the city in the center is suffocating, the public housing project of the burbs. Rusk   wrote  in 1993 in the Baltimore SUN: Rusk book 1995 Forty percent of America's cities are programmed to fail. Gary, Camden, East St. Louis are already clinically dead. Bridgeport, Newark, Hartford, Cleveland, Detroit are on life-support systems. New York, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia are sinking. Though seemingly healthy, Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta are already infe

"We believe that the advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life" (Aravena) the slightly elevated view: Biennale poster There seems to be so much that is more urgent than writing about the artistic joys of architecture, even when  this year's architecture Biennale in Venice itself conveys urgency with its rather breathless title "Reports from the Front". This isn’t a report from Venice nor is it my intend to write a critique. Instead, this article assumes that the front is everywhere, especially in Baltimore. The article, then, is intended as an exploration of the tension between artistic impetus, user participation, pragmatism, crisis management, social pragmatism and long-term visionary thinking.  It looks as if Biennale Director Aravena himself and the US Pavilion with its exhibit about Detroit are good cases for this inquiry. I will explain why. Pritzker Prize winner and Biennale Director: Aravena First a

“Connectivity is the new meta-pattern of our age” (Parag Khanna) Among the popular urban planning buzzwords connectivity is currently king. Progressing from sustainability to resilience to connectivity makes some sense, especially when applied to cities: There’s no sustainability without resilience and no resilience without connectivity. In the universe of inspiring TED talkers simplifying our increasingly complex world, Parag Khanna and   connectivity   stand out.  Nobody speaks more glowingly about the global impacts of connectivity than this talk show guest du jour, "global strategist", and cosmopolitan based in Singapore, educated in the US. His new book:   Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization   is an urgent antidote to the provincialism of isolationists that is mushrooming in Europe and the US (The European Union and Brexit, the anti-trade agreement movements, the populist stands against immigration in the US). The book and his theories for everythin

Utopia. an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia  (1516) by Sir Thomas More. Even though urban life has globally become the predominant form of existence, t he hunger for an urban Utopia, for a completely different and perfect city, has lost its luster. Too often it has been tried and failed, too often the results were mediocre or so far from "perfect" that a mockery has been made of the term. Architects such as Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright developed Utopian models, so did the landscape architect Ebenezer Howard and the entrepreneur Pullman. Architects like to quote Daniel Burnham that one should make "no small plans".   But the time when powerful or creative white men could cast a mold for others to adjust to has passed.  Floating City: Utopia? This article will show how a global manufacturer of vertical transportation agrees and disagrees with that conclusion. Not Utopia but pragmatic small