Plans for additional lines progress, and our ways of shopping, dining, and commuting are changing dramatically. As we embrace riding the new Hiawatha light rail line, an older era comes to mind—the age when everyone rode the more than 500 miles of track that crisscrossed the Twin Cities.In Twin Cities by Trolley, John Diers and Aaron Isaacs offer a rolling snapshot of Minneapolis and St. Paul from the 1880s to the 1950s, when the streetcar system shaped the growth and character of the entire metropolitan area. More than 400 photographs and 70 maps let the reader follow the tracks from Stillwater to University Avenue to Lake Minnetonka, through Uptown to downtown Minneapolis. The illustrations show nearly every neighborhood in Minneapolis and St. Paul as it was during the streetcar era.At its peak in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Twin City Rapid Transit Company (TCRT) operated over 900 streetcars, owned 523 miles of track, and carried more than 200 million passengers annually. Recounting the rise and fall of the TCRT, Twin Cities by Trolley explores the history, organization, and operations of the streetcar system, including life as a streetcar operator and the technology, design, and construction of the cars.Inspiring fond memories for anyone who grew up in the Twin Cities, Twin Cities by Trolley leads readers on a fascinating and enlightening tour of this bygone era in the neighborhood and the city they call home.John W. Diers has worked in the transit industry for thirty-five years, including twenty-five years at the Twin Cities Metropolitan Transit Commission. He has written for Trains, and has served on the board of the Minnesota Transportation Museum.Aaron Isaacs worked with Metro Transit for thirty-three years. He is the author of Twin City Lines—The 1940s and The Como-Harriet Streetcar Line. He is also the editor of Railway Museum Quarterly.

    MacLean helps planners, designers, public officials, and citizens better understand how residential density can help save energy, dollars, and the environment.

    Unchecked development in multicity regions has damaged the natural environment, snarled traffic, and caused us to burn petroleum at a rate far greater than the rest of the world. Smart Growth in a Changing World documents the United States’ hidden growth crisis and shows how balanced transportation and natural resource preservation can put urban development on a sustainable path, as well as making it more efficient and equitable for consumers.This groundbreaking volume on the urban dilemma features case studies on transportation and conservation in Florida and the Northeast as well as proposals for hazard migration, green cities, mixed-use centers, walkable neighborhoods, and planning policies at the national level. As our global competitors are investing in smart growth strategies such as high-speed rail lines and regional rapid transit, this timely book calls for a similarly forward-thinking new development approach in the United States.

    However, as Craig L. Wilkins observes, that diary includes far too few narratives of the diverse cultures in U.S. society. Wilkins states that the discipline of architecture has a resistance to African Americans at every level, from the startlingly small number of architecture students to the paltry number of registered architects in the United States today.Working to understand how ideologies are formed, transmitted, and embedded in the built environment, Wilkins deconstructs how the marginalization of African Americans is authorized within the field of architecture. He then outlines how activist forms of expression shape and sustain communities, fashioning an architectural theory around the site of environmental conflict constructed by hip-hop culture.Wilkins places his concerns in a historical context, and also offers practical solutions to address them. In doing so, he reveals new possibilities for an architecture that acknowledges its current shortcomings and replies to the needs of multicultural constituencies.Craig L. Wilkins, a registered architect, teaches architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan.

    Stevens explores and analyzes these case studies according to locations where play has been observed: paths, intersections, thresholds, boundaries and props.Applicable to a wide-range of countries and city forms, The Ludic City is a fascinating and stimulating read for all who are involved or interested in the design of urban spaces.

    This book, a geographic study of the changing nature of CBDs, represents a concise, well-ordered, and readable attempt to deal with that concern. Written by a widely known authority on the subject, it provides a comprehensive summary and analysis of much of the research done on CBDs over the past two decades and establishes many striking generalizations regarding the past, present and future evolutions of CBDs, both in this country and abroad.Using maps and diagrams where helpful, Murphy, a pioneer researcher in this field from the standpoint of economic geography, provides the record of his own and others' attempts to define CBDs and to develop theories about them. He not only presents the story of the research attack on the CBDs of a number of cities, including estimates of their probable future, but also details a practicable technique for delimiting and studying CBDs.An important feature of the book is the attention Murphy devotes to the valuable work done in this field outside America, and his examples, which fully cover the American experience, are by no means confined to it, taking in important urban centres throughout the world. This book, intended for anyone interested in the urban scene, will be particularly helpful to students and teachers of urban geography and to practicing urban planners.

    

    True Urbanism, his passionate and highly readable appeal for re-engagement with city life, celebrates the growing number of people who reject sterile, paint-by-numbers subdivisions in favor of rich, vibrant, and often unpredictable urban neighborhoods.Through a series of fascinating case studies, this volume demonstrates how cities can create mixed-use districts dense enough to support a variety of locally owned businesses, lively street life, and cultural institutions, while also outlining design guidelines that allow for architectural creativity and regulations that promote housing development for every income and age level. Now that the dust has settled from the late-twentieth-century development boom, this vivid account of cities large and small will show communities how to shed their lingering antiurban tendencies in favor of embracing density as destiny.

    The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material needs as well as time and space for leisure. In this first study of the French avant-garde tendency known as spatial urbanism, Larry Busbea analyzes projects by artists and architects (including the most famous spatial practitioner, Yona Friedman) and explores texts (many of which have never before been translated from the French) by Michel Ragon, the influential founder of the Groupe International d'Architecture Prospective (GIAP), Victor Vasarely, and others. Even at its most fanciful, Busbea argues, the French urban utopia provided an image for social transformations that were only beginning to be described by cultural theorists and sociologists.

    In it he presents his philosophies and practical wisdom to help people create their own shared spaces. The book features photo-essay case studies from the last fifty years of Linn’s career. These are projects that cross boundaries between professional design and neighborhood activism—community gardens, playgrounds, and parks built by the people who use them.