The document discusses how the built environment of cities and design decisions by planners and architects can determine tipping points for social phenomena to spread widely. It summarizes Malcolm Gladwell's theory of tipping points, where ideas or trends spread exponentially once a threshold is reached. The document then discusses how cities were at a tipping point in the early 20th century due to problems linked to urban design. After WWII, suburban sprawl fueled by cars became dominant. Now, issues like climate change and congestion show the unsustainability of 20th century urbanization patterns. Sustainable community planning aims to revive urban planning's visionary role by asking what kind of communities people want.

1. Tipping Point & Built
Environment
HOW BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF CITIES & DESIGN DECISIONS BY PLANNERS AND
ARCHITECTS DETERMINE TIPPING POINT FOR INTANGIBLE EPIDEMICS ?

2. Malcolm Gladwell
NY Times bestseller in year 2000
What is the Tipping Point?
That magic moment when an idea, trend or
social behaviour crosses, tips and spreads like
wildfire.

3. THE LAW OF THE FEW
A tiny percentage of people
do the majority of the work
to build momentum.
THE STICKINESS
FACTOR
Stickiness means that a
message makes an
impact – it’s
memorable.
environment than they
seem.
do the majorit
to build m
THE POWER OF
CONTEXT
Human beings are a lot
more sensitive to their
RULES OF EPIDEMICS
These provide a direction for
how to go about reaching a
tipping point.

4. VIDEO RESOURCE:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell ► Animated Book Summary

5. URBAN THEORIES AND REFERENCES FOR CONTEMPORARY TIMES
Please note that all clips, videos and contents are viewpoint & ideas of cited author.

6. URBAN TIPPING POINT -RAY TOMALTY
SEP 2009 | YOUR TOWN - SUSTAINABILITY BY DESIGN 35.5CATEGORIES: PLANNING
 AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY, cities were at a tipping point.
 Many people believed that broad social problems, such as poor public
health, poverty, widening class divisions and social unrest, were closely
linked to the design and (non-)functioning of cities.
 Visionary urbanists, such as Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and
Thomas Adams, showed how humans could settle in ways that would be in
concert with, rather than in opposition to, human aspirations and natural
settings.
 Their prescriptions usually involved some form– essentially to thin and air
out the city by building garden suburb of decentralization or self-sufficient
satellite towns in surrounding regions.
Ray Tomalty
Ray Tomalty is principal
of Smart Cities
Research, a
Montréal consulting firm
that specializes in issues
related to urban
sustainability. He is also
an adjunct professor at the
School of Urban Planning
at McGill
University, an AJeditorial
board member and a
regular contributor to the
magazine.

7. Today, we are at another tipping point.
 Victimized by the decentralization movement’s success, our cities have become
giant machines that convert vast quantities of fossil fuels into asphalt, air
pollution and greenhouse gases.
 Cheap fuel and the introduction of the automobile gradually pried open the
urban hinterlands for waves of suburban development. This process, which
began around 1900, picked up speed after the Second World War when it
became the dominant form of development throughout Canada and the US.
 Although profit seeking developers drove it, planners, whose visionary profession
was transformed into a bureaucratic process based on zoning rules and
engineering standards, facilitated it. In a few short decades, we used up much
of the ancient energy stored in the Earth’s crust to fuel our sprawling cities and
their auto-based transportation systems
Ray Tomalty
Ray Tomalty is principal
of Smart Cities
Research, a
Montréal consulting firm
that specializes in issues
related to urban
sustainability. He is also
an adjunct professor at the
School of Urban Planning
at McGill
University, an AJeditorial
board member and a
regular contributor to the
magazine.

8. Consequences of decentralization?
Many people now see the warming planet, longer commutes, worsening traffic
congestion, rising fuel costs and disappearing countryside as signals that the form of
urbanization that marked the 20th century was an aberration from which we must now
recover, or face dire consequences. As British green-urbanist Herbert Girardet says,
“There will be no sustainable world without sustainable cities.” Once again, the fate of
the world is tied inexorably to the fate of our cities.
Ray Tomalty
Ray Tomalty is principal
of Smart Cities
Research, a
Montréal consulting firm
that specializes in issues
related to urban
sustainability. He is also
an adjunct professor at the
School of Urban Planning
at McGill
University, an AJeditorial
board member and a
regular contributor to the
magazine.

9. Solution?
Sustainable-community planning (SCP) is a new movement that is reviving the visionary role of
urban planning. It marks an important turn away from conventional planning, which is based
on the tacit assumption that current trends (e.g., population-growth, land-consumption and
energy-use) can be extrapolated indefinitely into the future. In contrast, SCP asks a simple
question: “What kind of community do we really want and how should we realize it?” It raises
the radical possibility that in order to preserve the things that most people cherish – a livable
environment, a healthy lifestyle, meaningful employment and a rewarding life – we might
have to change how we plan, design and build our cities.

11. URBAN TIPPING POINTS - Roots of Violence
 Cities are often violent places – a social,
ethnic and religious tinderbox of people
piled up together with competing needs
for space, housing or cash. Mostly the
tension is contained, but not always - when
and why does it spill over into bloody
mayhem?
 The Urban Tipping Point scanned the
literature and identified four ‘conventional
wisdoms’ on the causes, not always based
on much evidence: they are poverty;
‘youth bulges’ (demographic, rather than
waistlines); political exclusion and gender-
based insecurity. It decided to test these
with empirical research in four very
dissimilar cities - Nairobi (Kenya), Dili (Timor-
Leste), Santiago (Chile) and Patna (India).
Dr Duncan Green is Head
of Research at Oxfam GB
and a Visiting Fellow at
the Institute for
Development Studies. He
is author of From Poverty
to Power: How Active
Citizens and Effective
States can Change the
World(Oxfam
International, June 2008).
His daily development
blog can be found
at http://www.oxfamblogs.
org/fp2p/.

12. THE MYTH OF PUBLIC
HOUSING: FAILED
• Pruitt-Igoe Public
Housing, St. Louis
• Pink Houses, NY,
Brooklyn
• Cabrini-Green
Public Housing,
Chicago
• Winniepeg Public
Housing -
Canada

13. VIDEO RESOURCE:
PRUITT-IGOE: Dream to Nightmare
Why did we build high-rise public housing projects?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/04/crime-community-
designer-social-housing-winnipeg

14. THE MYTH OF PUBLIC
HOUSING: Successful
• Quayside Village,
Canada
• Savonnerie
Heymans Public
Housing, Brussels
• Walter Segal's self-
build 'anarchist'
estate,London
• Quinta Monroy
Housing, Chile

15. VIDEO RESOURCE:
Incremental Housing
Walter’s Way, Lewisham
Alejandro Aravena: My architectural philosophy? Bring the community
into the process