Here, walking is seen as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the "negotiated" space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.

    When you flick on your light switch the light goes on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?

    Forty-two chapters comprise Hillman's writings on the psychology of public affairs: urbanism, environmental aesthetics, citizenship, and politics.

    Witness New York as it was being built in the years following the Civil War. It was during this era when the city spread uptown, landscaped Central Park, engineered the bridges and subways, and scaled ever higher in the form of innovative skyscrapers.The New York story unfolds in these pages with an immediacy only photography can capture. It allows us to relive the moment when the theaters moved uptown followed by the city's "newspaper of record," and muddy, horse-trodden Longacre Square sprouted its iconic neon signs and was reborn as Times Square. Trace the growth by accretion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as it nibbled away at the park or the transformation of Fifth Avenue into "millionaires row." Along the way, the majestic history of the city unfolds along with the story of the visionaries whose stamp it bears today. New York's coming of age coincided with the rise of photography, and this incredible trove of photographs culled from the archives of Time Life and the New-York Historical Society are the very images that created the larger-than-life reputation of New York that continues to dazzle the world today.

    Dozens of worked problems and end-of-chapter exercises help familiarize the reader with the formulae and analytical techniques presented in the book's three convenient sections:Transit System Operations and Networks Transit Agency Operations, Economics, and Organization Transit System Planning Visually enhanced with nearly 250 illustrations, Urban Transit: Operations, Planning, and Economics is a reliable source of the latest information for transit planners and operators in transit agencies, metropolitan planning organizations, city governments, consulting firms as well as students of transportation engineering and city planning at universities and in professional courses.

    Fascinated by these spaces, he bought 15 of them (14 in Queens, and one in Staten Island) for between $25 and $75 each, photographed them and collated the photographs with the appropriate deeds and maps. He called the project Fake Estates. Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estates" further documents and advances this seminal work, and accompanies Cabinet magazine's exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns in New York. Included here are responses to Matta-Clark's original artwork by 20 contemporary artists including Francis Alÿs, Jimbo Blachly, Mark Dion, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dan Price and Mierle Ukeles. Odd Lots also provides the definitive Fake Estates history, thus adding new dimension to the scholarship on this important artist*all within the spirit of collaboration and experimentation that marked Matta-Clark's short but influential career.

    The book also charts the styles and forms of contemporary urban democracy and the city as the site of a continuous redefinition of Indian citizenship.

    Bansky, the well known British stencil artist, after a visit to Melbourne, in 2003 said: "The walls of Melbourne are very noisy...like the noise of a hundred drunk people talking among themselves. "He went on to say," It looks like the city belongs to anyone that wants it. It feels like there's more opportunity. "Through intimate interviews, dynamic layouts and a riot of examples the street artists are shown in the context of world street art culture. Important questions such as why they paint are closely examined. Melbourne's walls are both canvases and meeting place for ideas, making it the hot-bed for the best in stencil graffiti art.

    M. Stern is dedicated to the synthesis of tradition and innovation. In more than thirty-five years of practice, he has produced a wide range of building types with a variety of stylistic influences, all inspired by the great legacy of American architecture. His firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, was first recognized for its distinguished houses, and residential design remains the cornerstone of the practice. This beautifully illustrated monograph—a companion to the best-selling Robert A. M. Stern: Houses—presents twenty-six of the firm's most memorable houses. Located in diverse settings across North America—from a valley in Colorado with sweeping views of the Aspen mountains to a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound to an island off the coast of British Columbia—these remarkable houses reveal the architect's emphasis on the importance of context and his dedication to exploring the nature of space. Each house invokes the vernacular architectural heritage particular to its region while gracefully reflecting its unique natural surroundings. Whether they are Shingle Style "cottages" by the sea, colonial Georgian country estates, or elegant Regency designs, Stern's houses are unique both for their timelessness and their ability to evoke a conversation with the past—a dialogue he believes lies at the heart of architecture. Pilar Viladas is the design editor of the New York Times Magazine.

    International in scope and exhaustive in detail, the book explores important exponents of "visionary" and "utopian" architecture in the closing juncture of the modernist era, coinciding with the cultural upheavals and social transformations of the 1960s and 70s. By revisiting "New Babylon, ht magnum opus of the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, whose vision of a situationist urban environment made him one of the most influential artists of this time, this collection of essays re-examines decisive work by Yona Friedman, the Archigram group, the Italian Radicals superstudio and Archizoom, Koolhass/Zenghelis and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and Le Krier, Timely in depth essays and exhaustive project documentations trace the decline of avant-garde projects in architecture. The result is a significant work of architectural theory and history, which will interest anyone studying ideologies of the past and dreaming the cities of tomorrow.

    Amid the mid-century debates surrounding the development and transformation of the American city and suburb, a renowned architect-planner, Victor Gruen (1903-80), became one of the most important figures in this rapidly changing context. Tremendously influential during the 1950's and 60s, Gruen's work was driven by urban planning problems created by the rapid onset of new suburbias, urban highways, and the subsequent deterioration of existing downtowns. Dubbed the "pioneer of the shopping center," Gruen envisioned the suburban mall as a new type of urban public space in the new dispersed residential fabric. In this book, which outlines the theories and projects that mark a thirty year period, Alex Wall presents the largely overlooked story of conflict between the ambition of an architect and the transformation of American society, its cities, and its landscape. Through a roughly chronological structure, "Victor Gruen, From Urban Shop to New City" fills a gap in the architectural character of postwar America, as well as provides insight into the ongoing validity of Gruen's theories and work within current discourse of the contemporary city.

    Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis.

    'Smart' design was once regarded as the preserve of museum exhibits or Jumbotrom advertising screens, but 'multi-mediated' interactive design has started entering into every domain of public and private life as a spatial medium, interactive architecture is revolutionising and reinventing our work, leisure and domestic spaces. Fast-changing social contexts are dominated by the blurring of boundaries between work and play, information retrieval and use. Pliable and responsive digital environments raise the haptic and intuitive threshold of public and private space by harnessing physical and mental responses. Will interactive architecture embrace a wider scope of functions and experiences - from sensing mechanisms, to the info-lounge, to the ambient home environment and the holistic hospital - through customisable design possibilities?Essays and interviews by international commentators Lucy Bullivant, guest editor of the issue, Ole Bouman, Antonino Saggio, Stefano Mirti and Walter Aprile and Mike Weinstock on the cultural issues raised by the emergence of interactive architecture will be complemented with features on acclaimed practitioners Christian Moller, Tobi Schneidler, Ron Arad and Jason Bruges. Benchmark interactive projects in this issue evolving new models of interdisciplinary teamwork include The Media House, led by Metapolis, IaaC and the MIT Media Lab and projects conceived at the Interactive Institute, Ivrea, Italy. New work is also featured by KDa/Toshio Iwai; realities: united, Usman Haque, Adam Somlai-Fischer, Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Lars Spuybroek and the Institute of Neuro-Informatics, ETH, Zurich, Kitchen Rogers Design; IDEO, and Tom Barker, b consultants/SmartSlab.

    The United States now has the most rapes, assaults, murders, and serial killings per capita, by a wide margin, than any other first-world nation. It’s a Sprawl World After All is the first book to link America’s increase in violence and the corresponding breakdown in society with the post-World War II development of suburban sprawl.Without small towns to bring people together, the unplanned growth of sprawl has left Americans isolated, alienated, and afraid of the strangers that surround them. Suburbia has substituted cars for conversation, malls for main streets, and the artificial community of television for authentic social interaction. This has resulted in dramatically negative impacts on US society, including:• The transformation of America’s community-oriented small-town sensibilities into an isolated society of strangers burdened by isolation, loneliness, and depression • The emergence of a culture of incivility characterized by extreme individualism and a callous disregard for others • Levels of violence so rampant as to be proclaimed “epidemic” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)Advocating that urgent attention be paid to managing development by emulating the smart growth examples of European cities, the book’s final section offers readers tools to rebuild community in their lives as well as in society at large. It offers practical solutions that can improve everyone’s quality of life.Provocative and thoughtful, It’s a Sprawl World After All also includes a helpful resource listing of organizations committed to making communities more sustainable.Douglas E. Morris is a freelance writer whose 14 years of experience living outside the United States in a number of safe urban areas has given him unique insights into cross-cultural urban comparisons. He has published numerous articles on the topic in the last seven years.