MODA Vi Research
Urban Economics Research
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6
Why Our Research Begins With Language
At MODA Vi, we believe every city rests on a conceptual foundation. Its streets, shops, regulations, and rituals are expressions of thought, and those thoughts are only as expansive as the language used to shape them. That's why our research begins not with data, but with meaning. Our work follows a three part framework:
We begin by developing The Lexicon, a set of terms we've coined and refined to describe the overlooked mechanics of civic life. From there, we move to Applied Research, where we test those concepts through field data, spatial analysis, and pattern recognition. And finally, we turn to Essays,carrying forward the tradition of great urbanists who shaped cities not just through blueprints, but through ideas. We publish writing that reconnects modern urban design to its human, cultural, and ethical roots.
Research Overview
Applied Research
Prize in Economic Sciences
Richard Thaler, 2017
Behavioral Economics and Real-World Decision Making
Richard Thaler's Nobel Prize recognized his pioneering work in behavioral economics, which challenged the notion that people make perfectly rational choices. Instead, he showed how context, emotion, and small design cues shape everyday behavior. This is central to MODA Vi's method: we don't just study city systems — we study how people feel and act within them. Whether it's how a coffee shop attracts lingering foot traffic or how street layout influences safety, we draw from Thaler's insights to understand the lived experience of the city, not just its economic abstractions.
Prize in Economic Sciences
Banerjee, Duflo & Kremer, 2019
Field Experiments for Local Impact
The 2019 Nobel Prize honored Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for revolutionizing development economics through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and rigorous fieldwork. Their core insight: real progress comes from local, testable interventions — not grand theory. MODA Vi applies this principle to urban life. We prototype small scale civic changes, observe how they perform block by block, and adapt based on evidence. Like Banerjee and Duflo, we believe change happens when you meet communities where they are and measure what matters on the ground.
The Lexicon
Foundational Essays in Urban Thinking
Cities were once written before they were built. These ten essays are not merely historical artifacts — they are living documents. Each one shaped how we understand urban life: not as a matter of policy alone, but of feeling, rhythm, beauty, memory, and power. At MODA Vi, we treat these writings as part of our own intellectual lineage. They help us see the unseen — how sidewalks form trust, how architecture encodes narrative, how a plaza or a storefront can carry the soul of a people. These essays remain essential reading for anyone who believes a better city begins with better attention.
1. The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety
Jane Jacobs, 1961 - From *The Death and Life of Great American Cities*
This is the essay that changed how cities think of safety. Jacobs argued that real urban safety doesn't come from surveillance cameras or fortress architecture — it comes from the life of the street itself. A thriving sidewalk, animated by shopkeepers, neighbors, children, and everyday ritual, forms a web of informal care and protection. She introduced the concept of "eyes on the street," showing how design and use patterns could either foster trust or erode it. At MODA Vi, this idea sits at the heart of our concepts like Civic Gravity and Anchor Economies — the unseen forces that hold neighborhoods together.
2. The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel, 1903
Simmel's essay is a philosophical meditation on the modern city's impact on the individual. In the fast-paced, overstimulating metropolis, he argued, people develop a "blasé attitude" — a psychic defense mechanism against sensory overload. But within this detachment, Simmel saw the seeds of individuality, creativity, and intellectual life. Cities, for him, are both alienating and liberating. This essay underpins MODA Vi's notion of the city not just as infrastructure, but as a force that shapes identity, emotion, and perception. It's one of the earliest explorations of what we now call emotional infrastructure.
3. Theory of the Dérive
Guy Debord, 1956
In this radical piece from the Situationist International, Debord proposes the dérive — a method of drifting through the city, letting its rhythms, architecture, and chance encounters guide you. It's a rebellion against the functional city grid and capitalist control of movement. The dérive is about recovering surprise, intimacy, and personal connection to space. For MODA Vi, Debord's call to "get lost on purpose" becomes a vital reminder: that beauty and meaning often emerge outside of planned routes and efficient flows. His work nourishes our frameworks like Temporal Density and Narrative Density.
4. The Right to the City
Henri Lefebvre, 1968
Lefebvre's essay is less about design and more about power. He argues that cities belong to those who inhabit them, not just those who build or govern them. The "right to the city" is the right to participate in shaping its form, its rhythms, and its future. It is a right to co-create, not just to reside. This essay provides the ethical foundation for MODA Vi's belief in City-Centric Economics — that economic and civic systems must begin with the lived realities of people on the ground, not the abstractions of markets or states.
5. Walking in the City
Michel de Certeau, 1980 - From *The Practice of Everyday Life*
De Certeau sees every pedestrian as an author, writing invisible texts onto the city through their movements. He contrasts the God's-eye view of planners with the lived, ground-level improvisation of walkers. Where the city is mapped from above as fixed, people below shape it moment by moment through memory, gesture, and desire. For MODA Vi, this essay illuminates how spatial commitment isn't just about buildings — it's about how people stitch meaning into place through repetition, attention, and story.
6. The Eiffel Tower
Roland Barthes, 1964
Barthes treats the Eiffel Tower not as engineering, but as semiotic dreamwork. He shows how it functions as an open symbol — carrying meanings projected onto it by tourists, locals, advertisers, and the state. Its physical emptiness makes it infinitely interpretable. At MODA Vi, this essay affirms our sense that design isn't neutral — it becomes narrative. The Eiffel Tower is a masterclass in symbolic infrastructure, a cornerstone of how we think about monuments, signage, and the mythic weight carried by urban form.
7. The Relationship Between Buildings, Monuments and Public Squares
Camillo Sitte, 1889 - From *City Planning According to Artistic Principles*
Sitte was a critic of the sterile, geometric planning of his day. He championed irregularity, beauty, and proportion rooted in classical European city-making. His key insight: public spaces should be shaped around how people experience them, not just how they look from a blueprint. For MODA Vi, Sitte's reverence for human-scale aesthetics supports our belief that civic beauty isn't a luxury — it's an organizing principle. His writing echoes through our emphasis on Civic Channel and Built to Stay.
8. What is a City?
Lewis Mumford, 1937
Mumford asks us to see the city not as a machine, but as a moral and cultural expression. A city, he says, is "a theater of social action" — a place where values become visible, where ideas and rituals take shape in stone and street. He saw urbanism as an art form with ethical implications. At MODA Vi, Mumford helps frame the city as something to be curated and cultivated, not just managed. He reinforces our belief that cities are vessels of meaning, and that beauty and function must serve human flourishing.
9. Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Walter Benjamin, 1927–1940 - From *The Arcades Project*
Benjamin saw the city as archive and dream. In this fragmentary, poetic essay, he traces the transformation of Paris into a consumerist wonderland, where glass arcades, gaslights, and commodities formed the new myths of modernity. But within that spectacle, he also found memory, resistance, and subversion. Benjamin gives language to the unconscious of the city — the traces of the past in the present. For MODA Vi, his work is a blueprint for understanding Narrative Density, and for reading urban form as cultural text.
10. Experiencing Architecture
Steen Eiler Rasmussen, 1959
Rasmussen reminds us that architecture is not just visual — it's tactile, acoustic, temporal. He explores how sound echoes in a cathedral, how cobblestones feel underfoot, how light changes throughout the day. His writing insists that good design is felt. At MODA Vi, we turn to Rasmussen to deepen our sense of Quality Experience — to remember that a beautiful city isn't one that looks good in renderings, but one that feels good to move through. His writing is quiet, sensory, and foundational.