… Eliel Saarinen quote “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” But, of course, in that quote, and in a lot of the conversations about the urban world, we’ve forgotten the next largest context for the city; the suburbs, the rural world and the small towns and villages that populate it.
So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It’s a little bit collapsist; let’s wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls - I’d love to see what we’d come up with then.
” russell davies: ruricomp