Urban Code

Cities speak, and this little book helps us understand their language. Consideringthe urban landscape not from the abstract perspective of an urban planner but from the viewpoint ofan attentive observer, Urban Code offers 100 "lessons"--maxims, observations, andbite-size truths, followed by short essays--that teach us how to read the city. This is a user'sguide to the city, a primer of urban literacy, at the pedestrian level. The reader (like theobservant city stroller) can move from "People walk in the sunshine" (lesson 1) to"Street vendors are positioned according to the path of the sun" (lesson 2); considerpossible connections between the fact that "Locals and tourists use the streets at differenttimes" (lesson 41) and "Tourists stand still when they're looking at something"(lesson 68); and weigh the apparent contradiction of lesson 73, "Nightlife hotspots increasepedestrian traffic" and lesson 74, "People are afraid of the dark." A lesson may seemself-evident ("Grocery stores are important local destinations"--of course they are!) butconsidered in the context of other lessons, it becomes part of a natural logic. With Urban Code, welearn what to notice if we want to understand the city. We learn to detect patterns in therelationships between people and the urban environment. Each lesson is accompanied by an icon-likeimage; in addition to these 100 drawings, thirty photographs of street scenes illustrate the text.The photographs are stills from films shot in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo; the lessons areinspired by the authors' observations of SoHo, but hold true for any cityscape.

Anne Mikoleit is a research scientist and PhD candidate, teaching architecture and urban design in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.Moritz Purckhauer is a former research scientist at ETH Zurich and is currently practicing architecture in Zurich.