Because Michael Sorkin's "The End(s) of Urban Design" from HDM 25 has been such an important part of my research, I found this exchange particularly interesting:

[William] SAUNDERS: [...] there is a mom-and-apple-pie set of principles that, rightly, no one takes exception to, things like mixed uses, pedestrian scale, banishing automobiles as much as possible, good public transportation, retail open to streets, street trees, etc. [...] Sorkin points out that all this offers a rather pathetic form of public life centered around comfortable hedonistic lifestyle mainly for shoppers enjoying their cappuccinos and their chance to buy Gap clothes, and if that's urbanism, we're screwed, because it doesn't have anything to do with political life or social integration.

[Margaret] CRAWFORD: Sorkin's attitude is typical among certain leftists who haven't examined real behavior in the city—there are now lots of paradoxes about what is public and what is private [...] The idea that only the raw city is authentic expresses a kind of Puritanism about pleasure: what people want in public space is pleasure.

[Rodolfo] MACHADO: Sorkin's position seems very '60s.

CRAWFORD: It's so '60s.

[Paul] GOLDBERGER: It is as retro as the New Urbanism.

CRAWFORD: [...] there are two kinds of public space: the agora, the very small public space of democratic interaction; and the cosmopolis, where difference is visible; and Sorkin is conflating the two, imagining that somehow a diverse public equals a public of democratic interaction. They're quite different, although they are not mutually exclusive. [...] In Central Square, The Gap is a social condenser that mixes publics under the sign of consumption.

SAUNDERS: I'll just say that if I'm in a city and my only option is to shop and not go to museums or anything like that, I want to go home.

(Farshid) MOUSSAVI: The Tate Modern sells more per second that the Selfridges department store in London.

from "Urban Design Now", same issue of HDM.

So even though I'm officially on charrette for my fall semester studio project, I'm utterly preoccupied by my thesis paper. Although I had a fairly complete outline nearly three weeks ago, I've been restructuring the paper continually. Here's the basic format, shown with the quotes at the heart of the research for each point:

I. Life on the Edge of the City

On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the primary neighborhood group disappear. The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its supposed benefits. The end product in an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set. [...] Those who accept this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find ‘The Lonely Crowd.’
Lewis Mumford, The City in History

II. Publicity and Everyday Life

We do not, after all, experience the city blankly, and much of what we do absorb from daily life in the city (be it the long drag of the commute, the jostle of the subway crowds, the blandness of the shopping mall, the elegance or grandeur of certain forms of urban architecture, the panhandlers on the sidewalk, or the peace and beauty of an urban park) surely has some kind of influence on how we are situated in the world and how we think and act politely within it.
David Harvey, The Political Economy of Public Space

[...] these spaces are like everyday life: 'trivial, obvious but invisible, everywhere and nowhere.' For most Angelenos, such spaces constitute an everyday reality of infinitely recurring commuting routes and trips to the supermarket, dry cleaner, or video store. The sites for multiple social and economic transactions, these mundane places serve as primary intersections between the individual and the city. [...] This realm of public life lies outside the domain of electoral politics or professional design [...] Unlike normative public spaces, which produce the existing ideology, these spaces help to overturn the status quo.
Margaret Crawford, Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life

III. Modernity and Mobility

La ville qui dispose de la vitesse dispose du succès.
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme

One could achieve speed not by concentrating but by fragmenting the urban, opening up the dense fabric to allow the automobile to run free, exploding the city in fragments over whole regions. With urban functions no longer confined within the dense environment of the central city, homes, factories, offices, and stores could spread out and merge with the landscape. Here potentially was a new synthesis of speed and space unknown to urban history.
Robert Fishman, Beyond Sprawl

IV. Density and Democracy

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors–differences that often go far deeper than differences in color–which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The only indispensible material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities, which as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization, is therefore indeed the most important material prerequisite for power.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

V. Toward Public Space as Resistance

It is here, perhaps, with the potential of physical space for sustaining face-to-face, confrontational discussion and debate, that the architect resurfaces as an agent who still has some marginal critical relevance in the late-modern world. How else, other than by providing a provocative public micro-realm, can the architectural profession significantly intervene in the universal megalopolis?
Kenneth Frampton, Land Settlement, Architecture, and the Eclipse of the Public Realm

I've got two weeks to pull this thing together.

In all my reading, I've found plenty of support for my thesis of transportation as a generator of public space. In spite of all the encouragement, however, it's pretty disheartening to read something like this (especially from an author you admire):

In dispersed areas, architects will have to give up on their dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of public spaces. Margaret Crawford, "Architecture and Dispersal"

"Giving up the dream" is a tough idea to swallow in the middle of one's thesis project, and, I suspect, a little counterproductive. Coming to terms with the realities around an academic architecture project is one thing; dispensing with everything critical and subversive and theoretically challenging about the project is another entirely. Finding a balance between castles-in-the-air design and concession to the status quo is a particularly anxiety-ridden task for every architect worth his or her salt, I suppose, and there's already an echo-chamber of debate on the topic (well worth reading, nonetheless).

I started the semester with this paragraph, from my original thesis proposal:

Designers must be able to productively address the American suburb and still maintain an energy of resistance and social progress, working to change the system from within that system itself. In order to effect real positive change in the public realm, architecture must engage the political realities of its production, rejecting positions of either detached criticality or enthusiastic “pragmatism”. By addressing the politics of program, site, and construction through design, without retreating into metaphorical abstraction or surrendering to glib commercialism, architecture can regain meaning and relevance in the lives of its users.

I still agree (kind of), but it's taken me another three months or so to decide that, for this project, I'd rather error on the side of 'critical detachment'. I realized this sometime around 5am last week, when, as I was verifying that my site plan drawing was accurate down to the hundredth of a foot, it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter because I'm still in school. Now: while it's not like I want to design in a vacuum, I do hope to maintain a certain critical ambition throughout the design process.

[...] Another interesting thing about de Certeau's views is that he has a faith in collective creativity of subjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spaces that are given to them. You could argue that the traditional notion of public space is a kind of top-down argument whereby public space is 'given' to the public. I would turn that equation around to say: how does the collective create public space with the spaces that are given/found? This means that the role of the architect is to make a space for that public – to create the conditions where the public can freely exercise its collective creativity. It's for this reason that I've always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript the use of public space. For me, a successful public space is precisely a space where something unanticipated happens.

Stan Allen: "Architecture and Dispersal" from Cities of Dispersal

Protected from direct antagonistic competition and with large quantities of surplus value at its disposal, the large corporation faces an acute problem of finding a market to absorb expanding output as well as to help expand the rate of circulation of surplus value. The corporation must therefore create, maintain and expand the effective demand for its products. There are various strategems available. Perhaps the most successful is to create a need while eliminating the possibility for that need to be met by a substitution of product. The effective demand for automobiles (as well as oil products, highway construction, suburban construction, etc.) has been created and expanded through the total reconfiguration of the metropolitan built form so that it is all but impossible to live a "normal" social life without a car [...] A need has been created out of a luxury.

David Harvey: Social Justice and the City

If we are ever to come to terms with the current proliferation of the megalopolis in both a socio-cultural and ecological sense, then we shall only be able to do so in a post-facto compensatory way, that is to say by adopting denser patterns of land settlement and by providing adequate infrastructure for public transport, operating at differentiated speeds – from fast inter-city trains to slower intra-city light rail transit systems, augmented by buses. As far as the first is concerned I have in mind the high-speed train that has been an ongoing development project in Europe and Japan for the last 35 years, with the result that today for inter-city journeys of up to 500 kilometres, rail has become preferable to air travel in terms of trip time, reliability, energy consumption and environmental pollution.

Kenneth Frampton: "On the Predicament of Architecture at the Turn of the Century"

Thanks for summarizing the first three-quarters of my thesis project!

[...] the privatized model of urban development embodies no nonmercantile aspirations. Suburbia today conforms to a simplistic, low-density, auto-dependent, money-driven model. [...] What one drives by in the typical American suburb is the result of little more than thousands of purely economic transactions. And in this instrumental landscape, each individual development is manufactured and considered only within its own short-term economic parameters. Any sense of a larger community or shared culture must struggle against the physical impediments of distance and the devotion to the automobile.

James S. Russell: "Privatized Lives: On the Embattled ‘Burbs"

(N.B. the Futura on the sign! Well played, Metrolink.)

In the mail today:

a+t continues to rock my world.