duany landscape

1. Note the subdivision of the quartier into immediate neighbourhoods and enclaves
(not all which are shown). The latter two apply the furlong as the measurement of
fine urban structure, the new standard passed by the Detroit Council. Good urban
designers have always created a structure of centres more rich than the that of the
american “neighbourhood circle” and the furlong measurement served to formalise
the pattern of mature urban fabric.
This is the new bit of urban theory that accompanies the diagram:
Immediate neighbourhoods and enclaves correspond to villages and hamlets.
These are “nested” within the city, in the same way that the old neighbourhoods
were nested villages, so the idea is not new.
1. The traditional (or original) hamlet has a strong central space, that serves
(indistinguishably) as a social and defensive unit, thus “enclave” the key to the re-
colonisation of the dangerous urban fabric. It’s been standardised as a furlong in
diameter. Think of central Florence before the sventramento, its disembowelment.
2. A dense village shares a strong armature with a mature (or true) immediate

2. neighbourhood or, simply, neighbourhood, which is where people identify (their
locus, or “place”) where the live in mature urbanism. A furlong radius has been
assigned it.
3. A town or bourg, co-responds to a quarter (quartier) borough. In a true organic
(non-mechanical) urbanism, quarters specialise to become the constituents of the
multi-centric citta (they ‘articulate’ as in Francesco di Giorgio’s diagram). For
example, one quarter can be centers on its market (T5), and thus “nests” a market
town. A city, a citta, is the constituent of a the metropolis, a “city of cities.”
The theory of nesting is more sophisticated than “folding” and implies that all the
spatial structures of human habitation are recapitulated and kept (“sublate”) in the
progressive development of more complex organic form. As you can imagine, this
is the best way to increase the resilience that is studied by Lean. The patterns that
are valid can be clearly recognised when large cities undergo immense stress, like
Detroit today, or 9th century Rome, and de-synoecise.