URBAN
What a Tower Owes the Street: Zürich Rewrites Its 2001 High-Rise Rules
Zürich voters adopted stricter high-rise rules: public ground floors from 40 m, a competition for every tower, bonus floor area for affordable housing.
Barcelona's Superblocks Run on an 1859 Rule Set: Cerdà's Chamfered Block, Read a Second Time
Barcelona's superblocks read Cerdà's 1859 chamfered grid a second time. The rule set, the measured health gains, and a GhPython sketch for your own city.
Kalkbreite, Read From the Rails Up: A Small City Stacked on a Working Tram Depot
Kalkbreite in Zürich, read from the rails up: VBZ depot, city ring, raised courtyard, 256 residents, and the written rules that hold the megablock together.
Delirious New York at 48: Koolhaas Mapped Manhattan's Stack Before Building Anything
Rem Koolhaas wrote Manhattan's theory after it was built. What Delirious New York teaches a Zürich Wettbewerb team about stacked uses and shared cores.
A Pattern Language Is a Dependency Graph, Not a Book
Christopher Alexander's 253 patterns form a directed dependency graph. Read them by in-degree and map your office's load-bearing details before scaling AI.
The Riegel Problem: A Nature Cities Paper Prices the Cooling Zürich Already Legislates
A Nature Cities paper prices the cooling that arrives from upwind — and Canton Zürich already maps and legislates it at 5×5 m. Turn the building.
A blind wall, three fixes, three shapes: a dosage curve for fear of crime
Nature Cities randomised windows, graffiti removal and planting on a blind wall at four dosages — three shapes, one gender gap, and a Swiss test still unrun.
Distance is also the product: what the 33/42 split says about proximity planning
A GPS study of 200 million trips finds the longest third of travel carries 42% of income-group mixing — so shortening the city spends encounters.
The City That Publishes Its Own Bones: Mining Zürich's Open Data From a BIM Desk
Zürich publishes its civic data free on CKAN. Here is how a BIM or Grasshopper office pulls parcels, zoning and vacancy figures with ten lines of Python.
Zurich Was Always a Chokepoint: Reading a City as a Dependency Graph
A Roman customs post to the busiest rail node in Switzerland — read Zurich as a betweenness-centrality graph, and map your own office's single points of failure.
