index

General outline

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Sprawl outside Washington, D.C.

The entry to Euro-Disney

  1. How can we improve the new but often unsatisfying places that surround us today?
  2. We should approach issues about places today starting from the basic conditions that make an area of space into a place.
  3. Contemporary places are often accused of being commodified, and other similar totalizing criticisms.
  4. There is no cure for the modern sense of exile, but qualities of places today that are often taken as negative may enable positive achievements.
  5. Our contemporary places show new kinds of unity.
  6. A better way to evaluate contemporary places is according to their degree of complexity.
  7. Themed places threaten to oversimplify our lives, but they can be lived in more complex ways.
  8. Suburban sprawl can be made more livable by both revealing and increasing its complexity.
  9. Discontinuous places show new modes of unity and linkage.
  10. The conditions that make our places possible also give us room for a more spacious inhabitation that takes advantage of those very qualities of contemporary places that occasion so much criticism.