Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

    And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential new book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the city, how simple decisions have cascading effects, and how we can all make the right choices for our communities. Bursting with sharp observations and real-world examples, giving key insight into what urban planners actually do and how places can and do change, Walkable City lays out a practical, necessary, and eminently achievable vision of how to make our normal American cities great again.

    The grid created the physical conditions for business and society to flourish and embodied the drive and discipline for which the city would come to be known. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York celebrating the bicentennial of the Commissioners' 1811 Plan of Manhattan, this volume does more than memorialize such a visionary effort, it serves as an enduring reference full of rare images and information.The Greatest Grid shares the history of the Commissioners' plan, incorporating archival photos and illustrations, primary documents and testimony, and magnificent maps with essential analysis. The text, written by leading historians of New York City, follows the grid's initial design, implementation, and evolution, and then speaks to its enduring influence. A foldout map, accompanied by explanatory notes, reproduces the Commissioners' original plan, and additional maps and prints chart the city's pre-1811 irregular growth patterns and local precedent for the grid's design. Constituting the first sustained examination of this subject, this text describes the social, political, and intellectual figures who were instrumental in remaking early New York, not in the image of old Europe but as a reflection of other American cities and a distinct New World sensibility. The grid reaffirmed old hierarchies while creating new opportunities for power and advancement, giving rise to the multicultural, highly networked landscape New Yorkers thrive in today.

    Places" Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects 54 pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers 'heavy entertainment' - strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics, or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible. "Everything is fantastical if you stare at it for long enough. Everything is interesting."

    Completely re-designed with an accessible, four-color layout, this second edition continues to build upon the fast-changing state of the practice at the local level. The designs in this book were developed by cities for cities, since unique urban streets require innovative solutions.To create the Guide, the authors conducted an extensive worldwide literature search from design guidelines and real-life experience. They worked closely with a panel of urban bikeway planning professionals from NACTO member cities and from numerous other cities worldwide, as well as traffic engineers, planners, and academics with deep experience in urban bikeway applications. The Guide offers substantive guidance for cities seeking to improve bicycle transportation in places where competing demands for the use of the right-of-way present unique challenges.First and foremost, the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Second Edition will help practitioners make good decisions about urban bikeway design. The treatments outlined in this updated Guide are based on real-life experience in the world's most bicycle friendly cities and have been selected because of their utility in helping cities meet their goals related to bicycle transportation. Praised by Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood as an “extraordinary piece of work,” the Guide is an indispensable tool every planner must have for their daily transportation design work.

    High rent is a problem for all of us, extending beyond personal financial strain. High rent drags on our country’s overall rate of economic growth, damages the environment, and promotes long commutes, traffic jams, misery, and smog. Yet instead of a serious focus on the issue, America’s cities feature niche conversations about the availability of “affordable housing” for poor people. Yglesias’s book changes the conversation for the first time, presenting newfound context for the issue and real-time, practical solutions for the problem.

    This is true both physically (built on steep slopes, the city has no ground plane) and culturally (there is no concept of ground). Density obliterates figure-ground in the city, and in turn re-defines public-private spatial relationships. Perception of distance and time is distorted through compact networks of pedestrian infrastructure, public transport and natural topography in the urban landscape.Without a ground, there can be no figure either. In fact, Hong Kong lacks any of the traditional figure-ground relationships that shape urban space: axis, edge, center, even fabric. Cities Without Ground explores this condition by mapping three-dimensional circulation networks that join shopping malls, train stations and public transport interchanges, public parks and private lobbies as a series of spatial models and drawings. These networks, though built piecemeal, owned by different public and private stakeholders, and adjacent to different programs and uses, form a continuous space of variegated environments that serves as a fundamental public resource for the city. The emergence of the shopping malls as spaces of civil society rather than of global capital— as grounds of resistance— comes as a surprise.This continuous network and the microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell which differentiate it constitute an entirely new form of urban spatial hierarchy. The relation between shopping malls and air temperature, for instance, suggests architectural implications in circulation—differentiating spaces where pedestrians eagerly flow or make efforts to avoid, where people stop and linger or where smokers gather. Air particle concentration is both logical and counterintuitive: outdoor air is more polluted, while the air in the higher-end malls is cleaner than air adjacent to lower value retail programs. Train stations, while significantly cooler than bus terminals, have only moderately cleaner air. Boundaries determined by sound or smell (a street of flower vendors or bird keepers, or an artificially perfumed mall) can ultimately provide more substantive spatial boundaries than a ground. While space in the city may be continuous, plumes of temperature differential or air particle intensity demonstrate that environments are far from equal.

    He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the progressive nonsense of the Big Society and the localism agenda, the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London 's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.

    Known for the beauty and purity of his work, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built remarkable houses, skyscrapers, museums and multi-building campuses. The clarity of this architecture belies the diversity of Mies's interests, which included philosophy and science as well as design, and Detlef Mertin's rigorous and accessible text gives the reader both a clear description of all of the most important buildings as well as the intellectual contexts for their design. The book will illustrate all of Mies's work with over 700 images, and will be a highly desirable object; the large format and generous extent allows for the reproduction of all the photographs, drawings and details essential to understand Mies's work.

    Over the past forty years, the Natural Environment has received more attention of the two, but that is beginning to change. With a renewed interest in "place" within various academic disciplines and the practical issues of rising fuel costs and scarcity of land, the Built Environment has emerged as a coherent and engaging subject for academic and popular consideration. While there is a growing body of work on the Built Environment, very little approaches it from a distinctly Christian perspective. This major new work represents a comprehensive and grounded approach. Employing tools from the field of theology and culture, it demonstrates how looking at the Built Environment through a theological lens provides a unique perspective on questions of beauty, justice, and human flourishing.“Jacobsen (Sidewalks in the Kingdom) offers a fascinating and thorough examination of the development and role of spatial relationships within a human-built environment and how it affects the human situation. . . . This is not another tome about ‘going green’ but a serious, meticulous examination of the physical apparatus, animated by human players, that makes cultures thrive, communities effervesce, and people feel as if they belong somewhere. It is a formidable read that demands resolve of the reader. But its worth justifies its heft. It is an excellent choice for the college classroom and students studying the social sciences.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    A core thesis of the book is that the principal strategy currently advocated to mitigate climate change--the reduction of greenhouse gases--will not prove sufficient to measurably slow the rapid pace of warming in urban environments. Brian Stone explains the science of climate change in terms accessible to the nonscientist and with compelling anecdotes drawn from history and current events. The book is an ideal introduction to climate change and cities for students, policy makers, and anyone who wishes to gain insight into an issue critical to the future of our cities and the people who live in them.

    Ambitiously designed community buildings, faceless mass housingdevelopments, and a monumental emptiness are the definingfeatures of Pyongyang - a city of three million inhabitants risingfrom the rubble to which the Korean War reducedit in the 1950s.This architectural guide to the capital of the Democratic People’sRepublic of Korea has two parts comprising a total of 368 pages.While Volume 1 offers a selection of images and informationon nearly one hundred buildings in Pyongyang provided by thePyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House and presentedhere without further commentary, Volume 2 sets this materialwithin its architectural and historical context.The Guide offers unprecedented insights into the capital of what is probably the most isolated country in the world, ruled in the third generation by a “first family” stubbornly upholding its own brand of stone-age communism.

    By identifying the policies and amenities that foster such streetscapes, Campoli teaches urban developers, decision makers, and students how to create similar communities and help to mitigate climate change by lowering vehicle miles traveled.

    City Cycling offers a guide to this urban cycling renaissance, with the goal of promoting cycling as sustainable urban transportation available to everyone. It reports on cycling trends and policies in cities in North America, Europe, and Australia, and offers information on such topics as cycling safety, cycling infrastructure provisions including bikeways and bike parking, the wide range of bike designs and bike equipment, integration of cycling with public transportation, and promoting cycling for women and children.City Cycling emphasizes that bicycling should not be limited to those who are highly trained, extremely fit, and daring enough to battle traffic on busy roads. The chapters describe ways to make city cycling feasible, convenient, and safe for commutes to work and school, shopping trips, visits, and other daily transportation needs. The book also offers detailed examinations and illustrations of cycling conditions in different urban environments: small cities (including Davis, California, and Delft, the Netherlands), large cities (including Sydney, Chicago, Toronto and Berlin), and "megacities" (London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo). These chapters offer a closer look at how cities both with and without historical cycling cultures have developed cycling programs over time. The book makes clear that successful promotion of city cycling depends on coordinating infrastructure, programs, and government policies.

    Features all the most outstanding examples of Islamic architecture, such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Great Mosque in Damascus, the many richly decorated desert palaces, the Taj Mahal at Agra, Topkapi Palace at Istanbul, and today s modern Dubai skyscrapers."

    It is also home to the oldest and densest urban settlements in the American West. Focusing on human inhabitation of the Bay since Ohlone times, Down by the Bay reveals the ongoing role of nature in shaping that history. From birds to oyster pirates, from gold miners to farmers, from salt ponds to ports, this is the first history of the San Francisco Bay and Delta as both a human and natural landscape. It offers invaluable context for current discussions over the best management and use of the Bay in the face of sea level rise.

    While it created tremendous growth, opportunity and prosperity for a generation that had just lived through economic depression and war, the way cities and regions were being built ? spread out across the landscape ? would ultimately be extremely expensive to sustain, far greater than the relative wealth the approach would generate. The harsh legacy of this reality is what nearly every U.S city faces today. A new approach to creating and sustaining prosperity is necessary. Charles Marohn is the author of the Strong Towns Blog and founder of the Strong Towns movement. As a civil engineer, land use planner, economic thinker and author, he brings a fresh perspective to the way America's cities have been built and financed. His work has been widely distributed and examined by decision-makers at all levels of society. Thoughts on Building Strong Towns is a collection of Marohn's thought-provoking essays from 2011, reworked and edited with some additional material and notes added by the author. There are 34 essays in all including: The Growth Ponzi Scheme, The Infrastructure Cult, Do we really care about children?, Complete Roads and The Diverging Diamond.

    His interest in minimising the length of paved road to number of houses served, and 'greening' the ubiquitous mechanistic bye-law suburb of the late 19th century provided motivation for defining a general theory of design, which under pinned Garden City principles. Nothing Gained by Overcrowding emerged as a principle which was to have a revolutionary impact on housing and urban form over the next 50 years.Unwin's theory had developed with his work, but the origins can be found in two earlier and less well known publications. On the building of houses in the Garden City' was written for the first international conference of the Garden City Association, held in September 1901. The following year he published the Fabian Society Tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense, in which he took first principles, 'shelter, comfort, privacy', and drew out general criteria and specific standards. Housing had to be freed from the bye-law strait jacket. This would sweep away 'back yards, back alleys and abominations ... too long screened by that wretched prefix back'.Republished here for the first time together, with an introductory essay by Dr Mervyn Miller, these three papers make clear the development of Raymond Unwin's theories of planning and housing, theories which were among the most influential of the 20th Century.

    Issue of CLOG magazine devoted to the single subject of the National Mall in Washington DC.

    His proposal for a high-rise city, where leisure, labor, and circulation would be vertically integrated, both frightened his contemporaries and offered a trenchant critique of the dynamics of the capitalist metropolis. Hilberseimer's Groszstadtarchitektur is presented here for the first time in English translation. The propositions assembled here encourage us to reconsider mobility, concentration and the scale of architectural intervention in our own era of urban expansion. This is the second title in the GSAPP Sourcebooks series.

    It travels the shifting terrains of architectural invention, where new spatial devices on a variety of scales--from the handheld to the inhabitable--reveal previously overlooked dimensions of the built and natural environments. From philosophical toys and ironic provocations to a room-sized kinetic mechanism that models future climates, these devices are not merely diagnostic but creative, deploying fiction as a means of exploring alternative futures: landscape futures, terrestrial scenarios for which we have no other guide.

    The essays in this volume highlight the key role of sound in the formation of central themes and areas of inquiry within contemporary American studies.The editors have adopted an interdisciplinary approach to their study of sound, reflecting on its cultural, political, technological, economic, socio-historical, spatial, temporal, affective, and formal contexts. The selected essays analyze sound and explore inter-American soundscapes within several areas, including• media technologies and consumption• race, sex, and gender• citizenship, belonging, and community• nationalism and citizenship• time and historical method• the public sphere and social changeHow have sound technologies and sonic media practices informed American identities? What role have hearing and listening played in formations of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, community, and class? What are the political economies of sound? The contributors to Sound Clash address these questions and more as they think through sound as a critical space, listening as a critical and cultural act, and sonic media as key technological sites of investigation.Supplementary sound clips are available at the American Quarterly website, www.americanquarterly.org.

    Fifty-seven years and a lifetime of stories later, at the age of seventy-one, he reached the summit. Part memoir and part hiker's diary, Manzanar to Mount Whitney gives an intimate, rollicking, poignant account of Japanese American life in California before and after World War II. As he wanders through the mountains of California's Inland Empire, Umemoto recalls pieces of his childhood on a grape vineyard in the Sacramento Valley, his time at Manzanar, where beauty and hope were maintained despite the odds, and his later career asproprietor of a printing firm, all with grace, honesty, and unfailing humor. And all along, the peak of Mount Whitney casts its shadow, a symbol of freedom, beauty, and resilience.

    Can the shape of a car make it more aerodynamic and more attractive at the same time? Could buildings be constructed of porous materials that simultaneously clean the air and soothe the skin? Can cities become verdant, productive landscapes instead of wastelands of concrete?Drawing from a wealth of scientific research, Hosey demonstrates that form and image can enhance conservation, comfort, and community at every scale of design, from products to buildings to cities. Fully embracing the principles of ecology could revolutionize every aspect of design, in substance and in style. Aesthetic attraction isn’t a superficial concern — it’s an environmental imperative. Beauty could save the planet.

    In The Italian Piazza Transformed, Areli Marina examines the radical transformation of Parma's urban center in this tumultuous period by reconstructing the city's two most significant public spaces: its cathedral and communal squares. Treating the space of these piazzas as attentively as the buildings that shape their perimeters, she documents and discusses the evolution of each site from 1196, tracing their construction by opposing political factions within the city's ruling elite. By the early fourteenth century, Parma's patrons and builders had imposed strict geometric order on formerly inchoate sites, achieving a formal coherence attained by few other cities.Moreover, Marina establishes that the piazzas' orderly contours, dramatic open spaces, and monumental buildings were more than grand backdrops to civic ritual. Parma's squares were also agents in the production of the city-state's mechanisms of control. They deployed brick, marble, and mortar according to both ancient Roman and contemporary courtly modes to create a physical embodiment of the modern, syncretic authority of the city's leaders. By weaving together traditional formal and iconographic approaches with newer concepts of the symbolic, social, and political meanings of urban space, Marina reframes the complex relationship between late medieval Italy's civic culture and the carefully crafted piazzas from which it emerged.

    The potential biomimicry offers in creating a more sustainable and even creating a regenerative built environment are largely unrealised. A fast emerging biomimicry network of international research and advocating design companies offer optimism in realisation of its potential in the near future.It is posited that a biomimetic approach to architectural design that incorporates a comprehensive understanding of ecosystems could pioneer a revolution of builtenvironments that go far beyond simply acting as zero carbon or emission environments but as a restorative strategy where the built environment becomes an imperative component in the participation with and regeneration of natural ecosystems.This research paper will attempt to compose a review of the literature and a critical analysis of the possibilities and impossibilities for the modern city to perform like a forest using biomimicry as a tool, to act not only as a life-support system but as a living, breathing habitat that works alongside the stanzas in the poetry of science, amongst the energy flows, human souls, all other living organisms and all that goes with the 3.85 billion years of existence of life on earth.Word count: 11,000+Page count: 91 (including references)Date of submission May 2012Citation: Davies, J.C., 2012, Biomimicry: An Ecological Revolution. Using biomimicry as a tool, could it be possible for our modern day cities to perform like forests?

    Acknowledging that a city is not a static thing, he argues we need to pay more attention to nurturing what he calls “continuous cities.” In such a city, he says, “new buildings, new institutions, and new technologies don’t rip apart the old and wreck it. They accommodate, they act with respect, and they add vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.” Continuity, he explains, is the way to promote sustainability— and contrary to what the advocates of “modern architecture” claim, he insists that honoring the traditional ways of city building still provides a solid foundation for places to grow, evolve, be modern. However fond you are of your city, or however much you feel it needs improvement, this short collection of essays offers an enticing vision of the future. All of our cities have a past worth examining, a richness of experience that can shape the future in wonderful, surprising ways. Solomon’s prose is thought-provoking and inspiring, well worth keeping close by wherever you do your reading—be it your bedside, couch, a park, or on the metro.

    They are at once fragile organisms in constant need of care and battlegrounds of conflicting interests. And above all, they're ours. The smart guide to Utopia showcases 111 projects, initiatives and ideas from all over Europe that make our cities better places. Whether it be an underground waste disposal system in Barcelona or a public swimming pool converted into an arts centre in Berlin, a self-sufficient urban garden or a solar-powered pop-up restaurant traveling with the sun, a building printer or a zero-packaging supermarket, this book celebrates the energy and imagination of people who want to make their cities a little more fun, clean, friendly, green and above all, restore a sense of community. Our cities belong to us, and they depend on us. Only we can make them worth living in.

    Filled with unique explorations and quirky prompts, it's the perfect place to keep track of favorite local haunts, as well as a starting point to experience one's neighborhood in a whole new way.

    Studio Gang Architects confronts pressing contemporary issues and seeks to answer questions that exist locally but resound globally. The firm’s work is exemplified by recent projects such as the Aqua Tower in Chicago, an 82-story high-rise, which critic Paul Goldberger described as “reclaim[ing] the notion that thrilling and beautiful form can still emerge out of the realm of the practical.”With the studio poised to contribute a new set of buildings to the global skyline, Building examines its most current work, twelve built and unbuilt projects that address four major issues facing contemporary architecture: its relationship to nature, the development of dense urban areas, the integration of the ideas of community members, and architecture and performance. Featuring essays, interviews, sketches, and drawings—many previously unpublished—this beautifully illustrated book provides an insider's look at a cutting-edge architectural practice.

    Qiu, whose best-known books are largely set in this old city, where his protagonist Inspector Chen walks around in investigations, is suited like few others to provide a lyrical accompanying text whose purpose is to celebrate the life, beauty and texture of this world before it has vanished altogether.No photographer has pursued this subject with more dedication and persistence than Mr. French, whose photographs of Shanghai have been exhibited on four continents. Taken together, the work of these two contributors offers compelling esthetics and lasting historical value for lovers of Shanghai, past, present and future.

    Included in these pages are some of the leaders in the movement, from Novella Carpenter’s farm in an empty lot in Oakland to Growing Power’s vast compound in Milwaukee. In addition to stories about the farms and their owners, sidebars provide basic how-to tips for such activities as composting, canning, beekeeping, and growing vegetables. A burgeoning movement that is fast catching on, urban farming taps into many touchstones of the zeitgeist, including environmental awareness, the foodie culture, localism, distrust of mass-production farming practices, and the DIY approach to life and living.Praise for Urban Farms:“Sarah C. Rich’s handsome, intelligent URBAN FARMS (Abrams, $30) chronicles a movement to bring kale to the people, an effort that stretches across the country, from Brooklyn to Oakland. . . . Benson’s spirited photographs capture the joy and beauty of urban farming’s bounty. No vase full of lush peonies from the grounds of an elegant estate could inspire such looks of eager joy as do the tomatoes harvested out of New York City’s Edible Schoolyard. These vegetable gardeners—and farmers—are working against such odds that there’s simply no excuse to let a comparatively lush suburban backyard lie fallow.” —New York Times Book Review