Can You Tell a City By Its Blocks?
What if city blocks could be extracted, isolated, stripped of all but their essential form, and lined up like soldiers for inspection? Would we know Paris or Berlin by the sum of their parts?
French artist Armelle Caron has satisfied this curiosity in “Tout bien rangé,” an assembly of what Caron calls “graphic anagrams” of well-known cities. The series, whose title translates roughly as “All in order,” is composed of digital images of cities printed on canvas — cities whole and cities disassembled, catalogs of parts for some Borgesian Ikea project.
Read more. [Images: Armelle Caron]
![How and Why American Cities Are Coming Back
When one thinks of the larger demographic changes that have taken place in America over the last generation — the increased number of people who remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the later age of first marriage, the smaller size of families, and at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their later years — it’s hard to escape the notion that we have managed to combine virtually all the significant elements that make a demographic inversion not only possible but likely. I want to emphasize that I’m not predicting a massive invasion of the cities by middle-aged suburbanites and their children. I’m mostly suggesting that the emerging millennial generation — the second largest generation in American history, second only to the baby boomers — will find an urbanized form of life attractive. They will move to cities as singles; as couples; as young married families with small children. Will they want to live in the city when their children reach school age? I believe many of them will, but there is certainly room for debate on this subject.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m46j63nmfh1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
