I own a little city

Awful pretty

Can’t help people

Can hurt them though

Shoot their dogs

Mess ‘em up

Be imaginative

Plant trees

Best to leave ‘em alone?

Who decides?

Sam’s wife is Sam’s wife and coveting

Is not nice

.

Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931 to two students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later, where Barthelme’s father would become a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later major in journalism.

Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme’s 1974 short story “I Bought a Little City” and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

Have you ever had a question about urbanism? Did you ever woke up in the middle of the night cause you did not know Charles Landry ?

Now…here is the answer to your worries http://growingideas.wordpress.com/ Ian Banerjee might not be a polyhistor but I am sure you are out of time for quite a long time if you try to read through the wealth of information.

Sometime small interventions are able to make huge differences.

Every Sunday, from 7am to 2pm up to 2 million residents of Bogota, Colombia enjoy over 70miles of care- free streets.

See more on streetfilms (by the way a great page to get impressions of cities from all over the world, films only)

Design if you give a damn….Cameron Sinclair and his team certainly give a damn, they are not building one icon after another, they are not talking about “what is architecture?” they make a change with and not for architecture.

http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/

Masdar and Norman Foster launch the world’s first city targeting zero-carbon and zero-waste.

http://www.masdaruae.com/text/v-files.aspx

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/1515/Default.aspx

http://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3088039

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/abu-dhabi.html

nao.eu.com entertainment proudly invites you to a short but intense sneak preview movie night on tuesday, APR22ND08 at Technical University Vienna, Seminarraum5;

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In his influential writings on urbanism, Rem Koolhaas’ rhetoric brings to mind that of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony: he is here to bury the city, not to praise it. And his words have worked well. Koolhaas’ insights have lent the world new sharpness and compelled us to choose sides. Like the crowd before Antony, the profession has been swayed. Yet, for all his eloquence, Koolhaas seldom offers counsel. Only in few cases does he offer strategies for managing or improving the conditions he identifies and describes. Amoral and pragmatic, he dismisses concerns for collective good and derides nostalgia. His words draw out battle lines, identify new alliances and spread new hope for what will be when we find ourselves at peace with our urban world. But do they offer a program? I would argue so. For, on beyond the seductive allure of Koolhaas’ arguments, it is possible to discern the programs that they imply - both those which Koolhaas himself continues to pursue, as well as other, possibly more powerful projects that he may have left behind. (more…)