ABSTRACT
The immediate comparison between modernist city planning and new urbanism may seem ludicrous, given their different origins and goals, but they spring from the same kind of impatience with the slow-moving evolutionary processes of urban transformation. Projective urbanism privileges existing and unique generative conditions, authentic cultural processes, incremental transformation, and physical pattern recognition. The reason to study building types and urban transformation is to understand physical change, to predict change, and to shape change. In a single-family type neighborhood, some extremely common transformations are found over a long span of time. Imagination is the key. As Rem Koolhaas has written, “Since it is out of control, the urban is about to become the major vector of the imagination. The study of the actual evolution of the physical city suggests many transformative mechanisms, transformations that can spark our imagination.
