ABSTRACT
Integral urbanism seeks to redress dispersal and fragmentation by recovering earlier city-building wisdom while also accommodating contemporary technologies and lifestyles. Integral urbanism is characterized by five qualities: hybridity, connectivity, porosity, authenticity, and vulnerability. While modern urbanism espoused the separation of functions, integral urbanism reaffirms their symbiotic nature by bringing activities and people together at all scales. In contrast to the modern attempt to eliminate boundaries and the postmodern tendency to ignore or alternatively fortify them, integral urbanism seeks to generate porous membranes. Phoenix is paying for its youth, then, by lacking the built-in strategies of older and wiser desert cities that protect pedestrians from the blazing sun such as compact urban cores with a range of passive cooling devices. Instead, the settlement pattern virtually prohibits walking while contributing to social isolation and environmental degradation.
