hildegard's moblog

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"[...]Vibrant, driver (meaning catalyst), sustainable, multicultural, challenge, iconic, diversity, holistic, tipping point, knowledge economy, street life, world city: every page is strewn with these comforting locutions which demonstrate their authors' obeisance to today's shibboleths. Urbanism shares the properties of a cult. No matter which particular physical or ideological remedy it happens to be peddling, it is always with the faith that this remedy will succeed where the last one failed [...] Such optimism is not so much touching as moronic. The real beneficiaries of the new cityscape of synthetic-modern "affordable" apartments, gesticulatory buildings, landmark bridges and lumps of "accessible" public sculpture are merely the begetters of such stuff (usually Libeskind, Calatrava, Foster, and so on) and the bodies that commission them, self-congratulatory regional development agencies that just adore "regeneration" because its effects are wholly unmeasurable."
- Jonathan Meades reviewing "The Endless City", a collection of writing on urbanism.