World-renowned urban design theorists and practioners investigated the nexus of social life and urban form at the Stockholm One-Day Seminar & Debates on Placemaking and New Urbanism. Elizabeth Moule, Stefanos Polyzoides, Victor Dover, Emily Thalen, Chuck Bohl and Ethan Kent focussed on placemaking and its relation to New Urbanism while deliberating upon the future of urbanism.

Stefanos Polyzoides’s lecture, “The Urban Block: Returning to Urbanism,” explored the block as the bridge between architecture and the incremental construction of the city and nature. Through regulation by lot, blocks have been used to guarantee individual rights to property and to deliver both single projects and an urban fabric. Through incremental building, they have generated a shared urban public realm that is the place signature of every human settlement.

Twentieth-century attempts to recast urbanism in modern form by removing the block have resulted in building-dominated subdivisions of inferior architectural character and poor social and economic performance. Codes that guarantee block form and a return to typology-based housing design can restore the practice of an urbanism in balance between public and private interests, individual choice and community well being.

Download the program (PDF 1.6 mb)