As noted earlier the Urban Re/inventors has a Flickr stream and an Online Urban Journal. In Issue 2, Alessandro Busà's editorial entitled Celebrations of Urbanity starts from the shift to an anti-modern urbanism resulting from a strong backlash against post-war urban development - both of the dispersed kind envisioned by Frank Lloyd Wright in Broadacre City' (1945) and the urban surgery approach of Le Corbusier's 'Ville Radieuse' (1933). An urban planner proposing to make antisocial cities is an idea alien to contemporary habits of thought.

Busà's editorial explores the notion of urbanity, or those wide array of qualities that are supposed to make places “urban”. There are, he says, different models of urbanity:

We have the archetypal Jane Jacobs’ urban model of Manhattan’s West Village, with its narrow lively streets, its short blocks, its mix of old and new architectural styles, its density of smallscale retail and its pedestrian friendliness. We have the “dirty” urban model of places such as Jackson Heights in New York’s borough of Queens, where urbanity results from the crowding of people of all races mingling together in a multicultural, chaotic, untidy and extremely lively environment. We have the selective urbanity of the gentrified city, home to Florida’s “creative class”, such as the new downtowns in Berlin Mitte, in Paris’ Le Marais or in London’s East End, with their array of Starbucks cafés, lounge bars and trendy commercial streets. We have the “urban renaissance” model, such as the new Covent Garden in London, where a brand new urbanity made of polished architectures, fine stores and coffee tables in the streets are mostly catering to gentrifiers and tourists, and where a strong surveillance through cameras and police guards is constantly needed. We have the “festival marketplace” model of a nostalgic, inauthentic urbanity, invented or reinvented as a commodity for mass tourism. We finally have the New Urbanist model, with its brand new, if often historicist, architectures, its pedestrian oriented environments, its dense urban fabric, its promises of an urban quality of life unknown to most US dwellers.

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