On the Park Bench - Author's Forum: Space & Anti-Space

Author’s Forum on Urbanism is a monthly series featuring authors in an hour-long, interactive discussion of recent publications on urbanism. The series, part of CNU’s On the Park Bench webinar program, takes a deep dive into each author’s insights through the lens of New Urbanism. The focus will be on one or two ideas that are embodied in the book, which advance the understanding of precedents and design strategies to repair and make sustainable urbanism. Attendees will have an opportunity to engage with the authors during the session.

Author's Forum on Urbanism presents “Space & Anti-Space: The Fabric of Place, City, and Architecture” with authors Barbara Littenberg and Steven Peterson, and interviewer Philip Langdon.

The book challenges the conventional idea of what should constitute the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of connective urban fabrics in the new global cities being made today, it argues that they are merely dense accumulations of buildings that lack the positive formal attributes that are required to establish an extended public realm. Cities cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of architectural and urban forms bound together in networks of public space.