For What, Are We Designing Cities For?

““For what’s money without happiness?/Or hard times without the people you love?/...”

— J.Cole, Love Yourz - 2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014)

In February of 2018, I (Marques King) was given the great honor and opportunity to deliver a lecture at my graduate school alma mater. the University of Maryland College of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. I knew I wanted to talk about my thoughts on the nature of the city as a whole - it had been my training up until that point. But from what angle? I am often riffing about human being able to spend their time on this planet in better ways. But that is often at odds with what most of us consider to be the most important commodity: Money.

I am of the belief (and will argue with anyone until I am blue in the face) that Time is Not Money. Time is greater than money. We can create money. We can also destroy it. It can lose value and it can gain value. It is subjective. It is malleable. But time we can not create, neither can we destroy it. It is objective. It is only given, and given in a finite amount. How we spend our time says much about the quality of life that each of us live. In this lecture I use time rather than money as an evaluative measure of a human life. Together we dive into how city architecture and the built environment manipulate people into spending their time, for better or for worse.

This is constantly and continually being refined.

Uploaded by UMD MAPP videos on 2018-02-13.