The difference between observing and measuring the City
One way to divide up the sheep and goats of the Urbanist community is to divide them up between those who learnt the city by observation, watching the city as it actually is, and the measurers: those who develop quantitative standards in order to make seemingly objective conclusion on how the city works. There seems to be a deep tension that goes beyond the simple division between Jacobs-ists and smart city or IoT salespersons. It is not the problem of ethnographic immersion versus the tyranny of counting.
A couple of summers ago, I found myself standing on the corner of Lexington and 53rd Street, Midtown Manhattan. I was taking part in a project for the architect Jan Gehl, watching the people who were walking past, trying to get a sense of how people used this part of the city as a place of work, home, a non-space to be crossed…
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Reading Development 