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The Joy of Streets

How can we create great streets?

Street, bl0ck, plot. As any new urbanist will tell you, these are the building blocks, the Lego bricks, of the traditional city. They are our starting point for creating streets, squares, and settlements. Across culture, climate and the centuries, this pattern repeats from ancient Mohenjo-daro to Victorian Manchester and from Barcelona to Beijing. This disparate but parallel evolution is a text book example of convergent evolution of a successful solution to a practical problem. Similarly, the eye of any octopus and any mammal have fundamental similarities even though we diverged on the evolutionary tree of life aeons before any eyes started to evolve. This is natural selection of the urban form. What works repeats and survives. What does not work, dies.

Read the full essay here