Urban / Forthcoming
The Delicate
City.
Notes on care, attention and the human scale of urban life.
The Delicate City starts from a simple observation: many of the qualities that make a city liveable are easy to damage and difficult to measure. A safe route to school, an active ground floor, a familiar bench, a caretaker who knows a building, a library within walking distance or a public space in which different people can be present without being forced to interact rarely appear as major infrastructure. Yet together they determine whether everyday urban life works.
The book examines the city through these small but consequential conditions. It looks at care, maintenance, social infrastructure, accessibility, human scale and the institutional capacity to notice what conventional planning metrics miss. It also asks who performs this work, who benefits from it and what happens when efficiency, scale or optimisation gradually remove the redundancy on which resilient urban life depends.
Rather than treating care as an additional policy theme, The Delicate City considers it part of the basic operating system of urban development.
The book explores
- Care as urban infrastructure
- Maintenance and everyday stewardship
- Social infrastructure, accessibility and human scale
- Public space and informal presence
- The limits of conventional planning metrics
- Institutional attention, resilience and redundancy
- Who performs care and who benefits from it
Who it is for
For planners, designers, housing professionals, policymakers and anyone interested in how small spatial and institutional decisions shape the quality of everyday urban life.
In development
The book is still being completed. Publication details and selected source material will appear with the first edition.