Best of
Urban-Planning

2003

Public Places-Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design


Matthew Carmona - 2003
    The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and practice of urban design from a wide range of sources. It gradually builds the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject.

Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design


Donald Watson - 2003
    It provides a single-source for the key reference articles on urban design and physical planning of cities, including social, environmental and economic data.This inaugural volume on the topic of urban design in the Time-Saver Standard series is written for easy reference by urban planners and designers, architects, landscape professionals, environmental engineers, civil and transportation engineers, as well as municipal government and planning officials. This "soon to be a classic" provides a one-volume reference that is indispensable for urban design policy and practice. It is equally valuable for the urban studies educators and students of architecture, urban design and planning.

Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston


Nancy S. Seasholes - 2003
    Although other waterfront cities also have substantial areas that are built on fill, Boston probably has more than any city in North America. In Gaining Ground historian Nancy Seasholes has given us the first complete account of when, why, and how this land was created.The story of landmaking in Boston is presented geographically; each chapter traces landmaking in a different part of the city from its first permanent settlement to the present. Seasholes introduces findings from recent archaeological investigations in Boston, and relates landmaking to the major historical developments that shaped it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, landmaking in Boston was spurred by the rapid growth that resulted from the burgeoning China trade. The influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century prompted several large projects to create residential land -- not for the Irish, but to keep the taxpaying Yankees from fleeing to the suburbs. Many landmaking projects were undertaken to cover tidal flats that had been polluted by raw sewage discharged directly onto them, removing the "pestilential exhalations" thought to cause illness. Land was also added for port developments, public parks, and transportation facilities, including the largest landmaking project of all, the airport.A separate chapter discusses the technology of landmaking in Boston, explaining the basic method used to make land and the changes in its various components over time. The book is copiously illustrated with maps that show the original shoreline in relation to today's streets, details from historical maps that trace the progress of landmaking, and historical drawings and photographs.

City: Urbanism and Its End


Douglas W. Rae - 2003
    Douglas Rae depicts the reasons for urban decline, explains why government spending has failed to restore urban vitality, and offers suggestions to enhance city life in the future.“A terrific read, moving seductively from the minutiae of neighborhood history to grand global forces.”—Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone“An extraordinarily detailed study of New Haven, tracing the city’s rise in the early part of the 20th century and its fall in the second half—an almost archetypal tale of the American city.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times“For anyone with the slightest interest in cities, this book is that rare combination: a must-read volume that you can’t put down.”—Planning Magazine“[Rae] has provided the blueprint for the next generation of thinkers and city dwellers who debate the future of urban America. . . . A tour de force of research.”—Paul Bass, New Haven Advocate

Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles


Sikivu Hutchinson - 2003
    She highlights the influence of American anti-urbanism upon visions of the city during the Great Migration and World War II eras. Proceeding from the premise that the creation of city spaces are informed by collective cultural memory, Hutchinson explores how the decline of public transportation and the rise of the automobile have shaped African American communities and cultures in Los Angeles.

Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street


Jonathan Tilove - 2003
    streets, avenues, and boulevards across the country--in Harlem; Belle Glade, Florida; Atlanta; Selma, Alabama; Jackson and Canton, Mississippi; Chicago; Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; and nearly a score of cities and towns throughout Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.As this journey reveals, life along King is at once tightly conjoined and kaleidoscopically diverse. And that is precisely what Tilove has lyrically portrayed in the writing of this book, and what Falco has so superbly illumined with his rich photographs of the people along Martin Luther King.We meet Annie Williams, who lives and works on Belle Glade’s Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, managing the Sudsy City Laundromat, and who likes the idea that every black community she visits now has a main street with a common name; and Marion Tumbleweed Beach, a seventy-three-year-old teacher, writer, poet, reporter, editor, and activist who lives on Martin Luther King Street in Selma, Alabama, but finds the phenomenon a source of dismay: “I say they still get us with trinkets. We go cheap. I resent it.”Tilove writes of the King streets: “Map them and you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six. There is no other street like it.”

Road to Ruin: An Introduction to Sprawl and How to Cure It


Dom Nozzi - 2003
    The time is ripe for resurrecting the tradition of designing that makes people, not cars, happy.Since the end of World War II, America has been obsessed with a desire to improve conditions for cars, not people, primarily through enormous subsidies for road widening and construction of free parking. Not only does this obsession worsen conditions for motorists (at great public expense), it traps communities in a vicious cycle that delivers a declining, sprawling, financially bankrupting future--regardless of the quality of regulations, plans, planners, or elected officials.Nozzi delivers an easy-to-follow introduction to sprawl's causes and offers common-sense solutions available to communities. The time is ripe for resurrecting the tradition of designing that makes people, not cars, happy. The key is returning to modest, human-scaled streets, parking, land use, and development regulations. Design principles encouraging walking, bicycling, and mass transit in conjunction with automobile travel are essential to creating livable cities once again. A professional city planner for over 15 years, Nozzi has firsthand knowledge of what works, what doesn't, and what real-world obstacles are faced when dealing with sprawl. Aimed at people who want an insider's introduction to our road, traffic, and land-use problems, this book is a useful guide to both professional planners and citizens concerned about the future of their own communities.

Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century


Leonie Sandercock - 2003
    Cosmopolis II presents a truly global tour of contemporary cities - from Birmingham to Rotterdam, Frankfurt to Berlin, Sydney to Vancouver, and Chicago to East St. Louis. Passionately written and superbly illustrated with a range of specially commissioned images, Cosmopolis II is a visionary book of our urban future.

After-Images of the City: Private Entrepreneurs in China


Joan Ramon Resina - 2003
    Believing traditional accounts are limited by their reflection of a specific historical moment, Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay focus, by contrast, on transition. In essays written for this volume, scholars of literary and visual studies, the history of architecture, cultural theory, and urban geography explore the ways perceptual or conceptual paradigms of the city supersede or replace others, while at the same time retaining the after-image of what went before.The writers touch on a wide variety of issues related to contemporary urban cultures as they journey through cities including New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Tijuana, Berlin, and London. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Camilo Jos� Cela, Honor� de Balzac, and Alfred Stieglitz, their approach is broadly cultural rather than technical. After-Images of the City takes into account the intrinsic instability of the image and reveals that representations of the modern metropolis cannot be fixed in time and history.