Guest Thinkers — January 23, 2011

Toward Better Urban Spaces

Stefanos Polyzoides is among the founders of the New Urbanism movement, a reaction against urban sprawl as well as the so-called urban renewal movement of the 1960s.

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Architect Stefanos Polyzoides is a godfather of the hugely influential movement in architecture and urban planning known as the New Urbanism. All those suburbs that decided to put in little downtowns and walkable areas? The whole loft thing? Infill development that puts condos in empty lots instead of sprawl out in the exurbs? Credit Polyzoides, his wife, Elizabeth Moule, and a small group of colleagues for co-founding the influential movement—and Polyzoides for giving it a name. Today the couple speak and write widely on the topic.

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Culture & Religion

Reflexive urbanism

This essay describes a model for urban development that takes into account and makes use of the externalities that exist in the built environment. Buildings and the people that inhabitat them makes neighborhoods and vice versa the value of a building is in its locations. How can better frame this relationship between an object and its environment? How can develop strategies for a integral area development that learn from the best global examples?

Close-up of an analog weight scale needle pointing to zero grams, with a black background.

Hard Science

You’re made of energy: The strange truth about where mass comes from

“A person’s mass is made not of ‘stuff’ in the way we normally think about it, but rather our mass is made of energy.”

An illustration of Galileo Galilei with a historical text and a lunar sketch alongside.

13.8

Why seeing Galileo’s original experiments left me speechless

“I was stunned. Here in front of me was the original apparatus through which a new vision of the world was slowly and painfully brought to light.”

Global geoid map with colorful variations representing differences in Earth's gravity field. The scale ranges from -100 (low) to 100 (high). Europe's position is central.

Starts With A Bang

Scalar fields: the secret sauce of theoretical physics

Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in physics. They’re more than mathematical structures. They help describe the Universe.

Collage of geopolitical symbols, featuring a close-up of a man's bald head, China's flag, a globe highlighting Taiwan, and circuit patterns.

The Present

Why the USSR and China fell behind the US in the Chip Cold War

Both nations made missteps, but China still has a chance to make up lost ground.

Up Next

Culture & Religion

Against Terse American Prose

The question of how forms of writing produce forms of thought is one that the literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish explores again in his new book, How to Write a Sentence.