Best of
Urban-Planning

2002

Down And Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis’s Skid Row


Edwin C. Hirschoff - 2002
    Encompassing some twenty-five blocks centering on the intersection of Hennepin, Washington, and Nicollet Avenues, the neighborhood was demolished between 1959 and 1963 as part of the first federally funded urban renewal project in America. Gathered here for the first time, Edwin C. Hirschoff's stark and moving images of the Gateway district's final days -- its streets, buildings, and parks, the rubble, smoke, and heavy equipment of its destruction -- eloquently capture its demise. Down and Out provides a unique historical perspective and the most extensive photographic record available of the Gateway demolition project.Joseph Hart's engaging and comprehensive essay complements Hirschoff's photographs by detailing the district's social and economic evolution and the political decision making that led to its destruction. Hart presents a popular history of Minneapolis's skid row and the people who lived there, migrant workers who learned that changes in the local economy could quickly degrade their status from valued laborer to societal menace (vagrant, tramp, or bum). By capturing the texture of life on skid row, Hart reveals the lost American culture of a bygone community.

Cleveland Heights:: The Making of an Urban Suburb


Marian J. Morton - 2002
    The region was once home to Native American tribes including the Erie and Seneca, and stalwart pioneers established settlements in the area as early as the late eighteenth century. In the post-Civil War period, as Cleveland was becoming an industrial metropolis, affluent residents began moving to the newly developed "garden suburbs," anxious to live closer to nature and farther from the smoky city and its increasingly diverse population. Born of this same desire, Cleveland Heights was founded in 1901. Here, in this isolated countryside owned by substantial families like the Silsbys, Minors, Comptons, and Taylors, entrepreneurs and city officials envisioned a clean and comfortable suburb for Cleveland's elite. Officially designated a city in 1921, Cleveland Heights quickly became not the homogenized suburb envisioned by early developers, but a community of widely divergent neighborhoods and people. Newcomers belonged to varying class, religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. A century after its founding, Cleveland Heights has become an "inner-ring urban suburb," boasting gracious homes of architectural distinction and attractive parks, but also facing the modern challenges of a dwindling population and commercial districts in need of economic revitalization. This new volume illustrates, in both word and image, the evolving life of Cleveland Heights from its beginning as part of East Cleveland Township, one of the region's first suburbs, to the present day.

Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice


Iñaki Ábalos - 2002
    The war, they claim, marked the end of the first cycle of modernism, challenging the belief that technological progress alone could produce a perpetually better future. At the same time, the war was the source of powerful new structural models and construction methods. The authors examine the ways these technologies have been inflected over the last half century by more subjective and integrated processes of spatial organization.In the first part of the book, Abalos and Herreros focus on the work of Le Corbusier, revealing the degree of complexity achieved in his interpretation of the modern skyscraper. In the second part, they look at the intersection of technical and cultural determinants in the design of high-rise structures since World War II. Among the issues they consider are the evolution of the load-bearing frame, the impact of high-tech systems on tall buildings, and the transparent building skin. In the third part, they address developments in office design and planning, tracing an evolution from the repetitive and homogeneous office skyscraper to the present-day mixed-use structure. Overall they demonstrate how the objective technical analysis associated with modernist architectural theory has given way in recent building practice to a variety of flexible, pragmatic, and environmental approaches. These, they suggest, have opened the way to new urban and architectural forms.

Planning Theory


Philip Allmendinger - 2002
    This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date analysis of these changes, how they relate to planning practice, and their significance. It will be of use to students and academics alike providing an essential guide to current planning theory and a new post-positivist perspective.

Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods


Lawrence J. Vale - 2002
    Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.The three similarly designed projects were built at the same time under the same government program and experienced similar declines. Each received comparable funding for redevelopment, and each design team consisted of first-rate professionals who responded with similar "defensible space" redesign plans. Why, then, was one redevelopment effort a nationally touted success story, another only a mixed success, and the third a widely acknowledged failure? The book answers this key question by situating each effort in the context of specific neighborhood struggles. In each case, battles over race and poverty played out somewhat differently, yielding wildly different results.At a moment when local city officials throughout America are demolishing more than 100,000 units of low-income housing, this crucial book questions the conventional wisdom that all large public housing projects must be demolished and rebuilt as mixed-income neighborhoods.

Urban Voices: The Bay Area American Indian Community, Community History Project, Intertribal Friendship House, Oakland, California (Sun Tracks)


Intertribal Friendship House - 2002
    In the 1950s, Native people from all over the United States moved to the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. Oakland was a major destination of this program, and once there, Indian people arriving from rural and reservation areas had to adjust to urban living. They did it by creating a cooperative, multi-tribal community—not a geographic community, but rather a network of people linked by shared experiences and understandings. The Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland became a sanctuary during times of upheaval in people's lives and the heart of a vibrant American Indian community. As one long-time resident observes, "The Wednesday Night Dinner at the Friendship House was a must if you wanted to know what was happening among Native people." One of the oldest urban Indian organizations in the country, it continues to serve as a gathering place for newcomers as well as for the descendants of families who arrived half a century ago. This album of essays, photographs, stories, and art chronicles some of the people and events that have played—and continue to play—a role in the lives of Native families in the Bay Area Indian community over the past seventy years. Based on years of work by more than ninety individuals who have participated in the Bay Area Indian community and assembled by the Community History Project at the Intertribal Friendship House, it traces the community's changes from before and during the relocation period through the building of community institutions. It then offers insight into American Indian activism of the 1960s and '70s—including the occupation of Alcatraz—and shows how the Indian community continues to be created and re-created for future generations. Together, these perspectives weave a richly textured portrait that offers an extraordinary inside view of American Indian urban life. Through oral histories, written pieces prepared especially for this book, graphic images, and even news clippings, Urban Voices collects a bundle of memories that hold deep and rich meaning for those who are a part of the Bay Area Indian community—accounts that will be familiar to Indian people living in cities throughout the United States. And through this collection, non-Indians can gain a better understanding of Indian people in America today. "If anything this book is expressive of, it is the insistence that Native people will be who they are as Indians living in urban communities, Natives thriving as cultural people strong in Indian ethnicity, and Natives helping each other socially, spiritually, economically, and politically no matter what. I lived in the Bay Area in 1975-79 and 1986-87, and I was always struck by the Native (many people do say 'American Indian' emphatically!) community and its cultural identity that has always insisted on being second to none. Yes, indeed this book is a dynamic, living document and tribute to the Oakland Indian community as well as to the Bay Area Indian community as a whole." —Simon J. Ortiz "When my family arrived in San Francisco in 1957, the people at the original San Francisco Indian Center helped us adjust to urban living. Many years later, I moved to Oakland and the Intertribal Friendship House became my sanctuary during a tumultuous time in my life. The Intertribal Friendship House was more than an organization. It was the heart of a vibrant tribal community. When we returned to our Oklahoma homelands twenty years later, we took incredible memories of the many people in the Bay Area who helped shape our values and beliefs, some of whom are included in this book." —Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation

Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space


Peter Marcuse - 2002
    Taking examples from cities from Sao Paulo to Istanbul, from New York to Edinburgh, and adding their own ideas, the authors examine what might be done to improve things for all those who live in cities.

Urban Transportation Systems


Sigurd Grava - 2002
    Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product.Urban Transportation Systems is a complete guide to the types of transportation available to communities together with the technical tools needed to evaluate each for given circumstances.