2026-03-27 Inverse Utopia
Albert Pope’s Inverse Utopia describes the transformation of the contemporary city from a centred, hierarchical structure into a dispersed, infrastructure-driven field. Where traditional urbanism concentrated civic, cultural, and economic life around a defined core, the modern city—shaped primarily by automobile networks—spreads activity evenly across a horizontal landscape. Pope’s “ladder” model of parallel arterials and connecting cross streets produces continuous strips of development, eroding clear distinctions between centre and periphery. In this condition, infrastructure supersedes architecture as the primary organiser of urban space, while public realms such as squares and streets are replaced by parking lots, highways, and privatized commercial zones. The result is a city without limits, without hierarchy, and without a coherent civic focus.
This “inverse” condition reveals a paradox: although the city appears fragmented and chaotic, it is governed by a highly uniform and repetitive spatial logic. Mobility takes precedence over place, and architecture becomes secondary to the systems that distribute movement and access. Pope frames this as an unintended outcome of modernist ideals of efficiency and decentralisation—an inversion of utopian ambitions. Yet embedded in this critique is a critical question for contemporary practice: if urbanism now operates as a distributed field structured by infrastructure, how might architecture and landscape intervene meaningfully within it? The challenge is not to restore the old centre, but to develop new forms of spatial intensity, coherence, and civic life within this expanded, networked territory.
2025-09-18 Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory
The Architectural Association School of Architecture recently published an English re-edition of Sebastien Marot’s 1999 treatise ‘Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory’. The French philosopher and architectural educator takes a counterpoint view to Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Super Urbanism’ and proposes a new approach to shaping territory that recognises the suburb as the setting for most people’s daily lives.
In the first of four essays he suggests that design is an act of memory and drawing on Frances Yate’s account of how classical and Renaissance thinkers stored knowledge in spatial sequences, he treats design as mnemonic work: assembling and arranging spatial ‘loci’ that remember what is already there.
He goes on in a second essay to explore the city as palimpsest – Marot adopts Freud’s analogy of Rome as a city where all historical layers persist at once; good projects excavate, reveal, and layer rather than tabula-rasa replace.
His is a subtle thesis that gives agency to the ground (geology / hydrology) and where architecture accepts a supporting role leaving landscape as the hero.
2025-09-12 Against the Grain
Appealing to the anarchist within me, “Against the Grain – A Deep History of the Earliest States” by James C Scott is a challenging and refreshing reading of the ancient history of the state formation with a perspective taken from beyond the ancient walled cities.
The book challenges the linear story that agriculture → cities → states → progress. Instead, it offers a contested, reversible history where people repeatedly entered and exited state spaces depending on incentives and coercion. Early states formed around taxable grains (wheat, barley, millet, rice) because they are visible, divisible, measurable, and storable—ideal for taxation, rationing, and corvée labour. Tuber or pastoral economies were much harder to count and seize, so they resisted state capture. Early state life brought hierarchy, taxation, epidemics, and warfare. By many wellbeing measures (diet breadth, leisure, health), mixed foragers/farmers on the margins could be better off than grain-state subjects.
Particularly interesting and relevant to our contemporary cities and the history that underpins our “civilisation”.
2025-08-18 The Square and the Tower
Just finished reading Niall Ferguson’s excellent book “The Square and the Tower”. Here he explores how human history has been shaped by two forms of organisation: networks and hierarchies. He delves into historical examples ranging from the printing press and the Reformation to the internet and social media. He draws on the imagery of the medieval town of Sienna with its tower symbolising hierarchies – top-down centralised forms of authority found in monarchies, bureaucracies and corporations. The square, on the other hand, stands for networks—horizontal, decentralized webs of relationships and communication, like markets, social circles, and digital communities. He finishes the book with a brief reflection on the extraordinary frescoes painted by Lorenzetti on the walls of the second floor Room of Nine within the Palazzo Publicco. Turning your back to window wall (undecorated) on the left is Allegory of Bad Governance, straight ahead and centrally located is the Allegory of Good Governance and to the left is Allegory of Peace.
I visited Sienna as a young person in 1982 but I don’t recall seeing the frescoes – or perhaps I did but didn’t register their significance - every reason to go back.
