Friday Funny: Blame the Architect, The Video

Although first published on YouTube in April, 2011, this video is making the rounds among planners on the Internet.

Blame the Architect is a lecture series by professor Wouter Vanstiphout on the relation between city planning and urban violence, organized by the chair of Design as Politics at the Delft University of Technology.

In this first lecture, the general theme of the series is introduced. The interesting section begins at 10:05 in the video.

From Professor Vanstiphout's lecutre: "Let us examine the riots in the French cities [Les émeutes des banlieues de 2005] in the Autumn 2005. In the outskirts of Paris, riots started that spread... to the outskirts of nearly all French cities. It was a completely new thing. There was a kind of weird discovery that triggered an enormous... preconception... [about] the relationship among planning, crime, poverty, alienation. It turned out that without exception, all these riots happened in post-war modernest, high-rise, public housing complexes. You can image who got the blame... The architect."

Thanks to John Massengale