​The City Wild book is on its way…

DESIGN BY DEFICIT
Neglect and the Accidental City

Susan Dieterlen, PhD

Neglect is all the ways, big and small, that cities unravel. There’s always something we should be paying attention to but can’t afford. The bottom of someone’s to do list is tomorrow’s neglect.

Unintentional consequences, things deferred and unfunded, are the unseen hand shaping our cities. These gaps can become the primary designer of urban environments and their impact on our lives – but we train ourselves not to see them. Design by Deficit brings this neglect and its effects into focus, and reveals what they mean for living in and around the city.

You probably don’t notice how it affects you, and that makes neglect a little more powerful. That’s sinister, because neglect hurts us, and it hurts some of us a lot more than others. Except when it doesn’t. Some of us, some of the time, are better off because of neglect.

In dynamic, approachable style, Design by Deficit reveals neglect’s impacts, including accidental urban nature, crumbling infrastructure, and spaces with no rules. But this dystopian image hides a surprising number of benefits. To see the good with the bad, we need to examine neglect’s real impact, apart from our ideas of how cities should be.

As a longstanding trend already positioned in critical areas, neglect can be a secret weapon in fighting our most urgent issues, such as climate change, inequality, and public health crises. A tactical approach stressing careful consideration of who reaps the benefits and how to offset neglect’s negative impacts lets us utilize the current of neglect to act.

The accidental city isn’t all bad, but we need to see it and understand it to help it work for us.


Could there be benefits from letting everything run to ruin? If we fixed everything, what would be lost? What’s the benefit of neglect and what’s the cost? Who gets the benefits and who pays the costs?

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