Dall’introduzione (originale in inglese):

From the introduction The ninenteenth-century neighborhood is an efficient machine, whose public places and streets are carefully designed for mobility and décor with a clear separation between pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Green spaces are often cut in geometrical or naturalistic forms, and they play an important auxiliary role in the public health. The matrix of this scenario is completed by a picture where commercial and cultural services are arranged to be easily accessible from the streets. Neighborhoods like Boston’s Back Bay, Saint Germain in Paris as the rue d’Isly in Algiers, testify to this high level of urban quality by their successful resistance to so many crises of urban transformation and population shifts. The nineteenth-century urban fabric, has remained quantitatively and qualitatively relevant to the mutation of the contemporary city, even at a time when the challenges of modern-day urbanism and urban development are reaching a never known intensity.

I believe that a return to the organic city of the past is impossible, even in the reductive nineteenth-century form. Nevertheless , I believe there are values in the nineteenth-century city that should be incorporated in the modern-day city.