ABSTRACT
On the sidewalks everyone holding either a giant coffee or a cell phone, as though a law had been declared against public displays of empty-handedness.1
Serenity is becoming alarmingly absent from our daily existence, especially within the urban context. Time is dense and space is tumultuous. The modern world that surrounds us is complicated, contradictory and bewildering. It is complex in its overwhelming response to a world population of more than 7 billion people, the complicated infrastructures, political and economic systems, religious differences and conflicts, and inheritance of a built environment largely constructed and maintained by climate-changing, fossil-fuel energy sources. It is contradictory because many of the built works and technologies no longer support the solutions to the housing of a contemporary culture; rather, they are the cause of many of the problems that are a consequence of it. It is perplexing because of the enormity of the problems, and the time and resources necessary to actually overcome them.
