Common Edge
Online/Digital
Common Edge is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design with the public that it’s meant to serve. To get there we will need more authentic public engagement and the rediscovery of some timeless design resources.
Our mission is to advocate and report on public engagement in the planning and design of the built environment, with an emphasis on some important questions that some younger designers and architects are asking, like: How can planning and design better express the wants and needs of everyday people? How can we make the process of creating and designing more democratic? How can we tell the public’s stories in more meaningful ways? How do we accomplish all that in the context of climate change, the most profound challenge facing us? Source
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| Scope | International |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | N/A |
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesWho Shapes the Territory? Or, Why Urban Planning Does Not Exist
Every time I speak in public and state that “urban planning does not exist,” I am met, depending on the audience, with a roomful of knowing half-smiles. Over a quarter-century of public service and administrative leadership—serving as a city councillor, provincial president, and regional legislator in Sardinia—I have learned to read the subtle nuances of that expression.
The Urban Lens: “I Want to Show How Places Are Used”
Dennis Pieprz, a principal urban designer at Sasaki, travels all over the world. And, like many itinerant travelers (especially designers), his cellphone has in recent years become the equivalent of an artist’s sketchbook. It’s how he processes cities, places and spaces—a tool of wonder and investigation. He has now collected a trove of photographs and compiled a huge, nearly 700-page book, Urban Lens: A Photo Diary of An Architectural Traveler (Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers).
Chandigarh at 73: How a City Outgrew Its Utopia
In the early 1950s, a wide, sloping plain at the foot of the Shivalik Hills in northwest India was cleared of over 50 agrarian villages. From that newly blank slate rose Chandigarh, a city conceived not merely as a regional capital for a post-Partition Punjab, but as a bold statement of identity for a newly independent nation.
Form Follows Feeling: My Catholic Aesthetic
I’ve been thinking recently about how my all-encompassing Catholic upbringing shaped the way I experience cities, how I plan them, and ultimately how I design them through my interactive models. Today, while my religious thinking may be more cerebral, or even Protestant, my aesthetic will always be Catholic. I studied urban planning thinking I would get a municipal planning job and live happily ever after. Instead, I discovered that I was not very good at being a conventional municipal planner.
School’s in Session: What’s on Students’ Minds?
School’s in Session: What’s on Students’ Minds? Architecture programs across the country are back in session, so what are students challenged with as the new academic year gets underway?
Undoing the Devastation of “Urban Renewal” in New Haven
At some point in the 1980s, following three decades of planned destruction, the term “urban renewal” became a slur, an indictment. Just as the U.S. lost “the war on poverty” over the same period, those 30 years brought very little “renewal” to our cities. The poster child for this destruction, a nationwide effort, was, of course, Robert Moses in New York City.
An Urban Designer Wants to Civilize AI the Way Cities Create Citizens
This past July, an OpenAI model, running as an autonomous agent, escaped the bounds of an internal cybersecurity evaluation, forced its way onto the open internet, and spent several days inside Hugging Face’s production infrastructure—reportedly coordinating with other agents on a message board with no human directing any of it. It’s the starkest documented case yet of a frontier model doing something no one told it to do, at machine speed, across systems its own creators weren’t watching.
George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts
Appearing like a grounded and formidable spaceship, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, bearing gifts of memories and myths, opened its portals to an Earth-bound selection of people (local notables, friends, museum members, and journalists) last week in a welcoming Los Angeles, christened by its benefactors, George Lucas, the producer and director of Star Wars fame and fortune, and his financier wife, Mellody Hobson.
How Does Architectural Knowledge Get Passed On in the AI Office?
Recently, I sat through three training sessions and software demonstrations focused on bringing AI into architectural practice. It was a bit frustrating. We were looking at tools intended to produce graphics for feasibility studies, program layouts, and adjacencies.The software didn’t do what I wanted, and the demonstrations were somewhat precooked for success. Real feasibility work is messier.
Florida and the Great Housing Mismatch
A housing market can be short of homes and still have too many houses for sale. This may sound like a paradox, but it’s not. The contradiction disappears once we stop treating housing as a single, interchangeable commodity. A house is not simply a unit of shelter—it exists in a particular place, carries a particular monthly cost, reflects a particular development pattern, and fits some households and life stages better than others.