Member-only story
Life On The Edge
I am on the edge. Not emotionally or psychologically — although this could be the case — but literally, physically, spatially, geographically. As I write this, I am sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Miami Beach, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Behind me is the whole State of Florida and, indeed, the entire North American continent. In front of me: the boardwalk, a narrow beach, and then a lot of water — and not much else between here and Mauritania, a distance of more than 4,400 miles.
This is what urban designers call an “edge” — a transition between, you might say, something and nothing. Urban designers think constantly about things like edges, nodes, paths — anything, as the brilliant urban designer Kevin Lynch showed us in his classic book The Image of the City, that makes a city “legible,” easier for people to navigate and understand. (The famous architect Edmund Bacon, longtime planning director of Philadelphia and a contemporary of Lynch’s, was obsessed with paths; virtually all of his work revolved around this concept.)
Most people don’t think much about urban design as a field of study, but they do respond to edges like you wouldn’t believe. In the big picture, nearly 40% of the people in the U.S. — more…
