Peter Le

All Posts

April 2, 2014 - 1:20pm

I his essay McDonough comments on Guy Debord's "The Naked City", a diagrammatic map showing the multitude of potential ambulatory connections between fragmentary parts of Paris. The fragments are parts of "localized space", cohesive realms with similar "atmospheres". This, he argues, is more precisely how we experience and navigate a space ...from landmark to... more

April 2, 2014 - 9:36am

A photo essay

February 26, 2014 - 2:39am
February 25, 2014 - 11:17pm

The Mitchell reading regarding People's Park reminded me of somethings I had read before. "The right to the city" was a term that I remember Henri Lefebvre wrote about circa the 1968 Paris uprising. The idea of what Jurgen Habermas termed the "public sphere" is closely intertwined the the concept of the common, shared space and democracy. The public sphere is a... more

February 5, 2014 - 3:31pm
February 5, 2014 - 12:04pm

In "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment", Robert Ezra Park challenges the reader to understand the city beyond it's apparent physical morphology and to focus upon its human social behaviors. Park, writing in 1915, is credited with coining the term, "human ecology", to describe how human activity in the city as similar... more

January 29, 2014 - 3:25am

New Haven's process of handpicking families for the Court Street redevelopment demonstrates the aspiration of that era: the ideal neighborhood housed middle-class working families, primarily white but also somewhat racially integrated, and whose architecture borrowed from suburban, pastoral ideals: small streets, few cars, wide sidewalks and close-knit neighborhoods. It's hard to... more

January 29, 2014 - 3:21am
January 28, 2014 - 11:01pm

Gabrielle Brainard 's historical account of the Court Street row houses touches upon many of the economic and social issues surrounding urban growth, decline and redevelopment. It was the industrial boom in the 1800's that spurred the development of the Wooster square area and it was industrial decline starting in the 1920's that spelled its decay. Throughout all of this, the... more