“Gridlock Sam,” one of the most respected transportation engineers in the world and consummate insider in NYC political circles, uncovers how American cities became so beholden to cars and why the current shift away from that trend will forever alter America’s urban landscapes, marking nothing short of a revolution in how we get from place to place.When Sam Schwartz was growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—his block belonged to his community: the kids who played punchball and stickball & their parents, who’d regularly walk to the local businesses at which they also worked. He didn’t realize it then, but Bensonhurst was already more like a museum of a long-forgotten way-of-life than a picture of America’s future. Public transit traveled over and under city streets—New York’s first subway line opened in 1904—but the streets themselves had been conquered by the internal combustion engine.America’s dependency on the automobile began with the 1908 introduction of Henry Ford’s car-for-everyone, the Model T. The “battle for right-of-way” in the 1920s saw the demise of streetcars and transformed America’s streets from a multiuse resource for socializing, commerce, and public mobility into exclusive arteries for private automobiles. The subsequent destruction of urban transit systems and post WWII suburbanization of America enabled by the Interstate Highway System and the GI Bill forever changed the way Americans commuted.But today, for the first time in history, and after a hundred years of steady increase, automobile driving is in decline. Younger Americans increasingly prefer active transportation choices like walking or cycling and taking public transit, ride-shares or taxis. This isn’t a consequence of higher gas prices, or even the economic downturn, but rather a collective decision to be a lot less dependent on cars—and if American cities want to keep their younger populations, they need to plan accordingly. In Street Smart, Sam Schwartz explains how.In this clear and erudite presentation of the principles of smart transportation and sustainable urban planning—from the simplest cobblestoned street to the brave new world of driverless cars and trains—Sam Schwartz combines rigorous historical scholarship with the personal and entertaining recollections of a man who has spent more than forty years working on planning intelligent transit networks in New York City. Street Smart is a book for everyone who wants to know more about the who, what, when, where, and why of human mobility.

    The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism. In the various enquiries and explorations of Model City this is also the mapping of a lived condition and its relationships not readily found on every street corner – nor in the broken ideologies from the populist bargain basement proffered by our political cadres. What becomes apparent is that the model city/Model City exists by virtue of a poet’s wit and inventiveness, in its accomplished and elegantly measured language. Stonecipher’s mesmerizing, epigrammatic fables establish the off-centre polis where, oddly, we find ourselves at home. — Kelvin Corcoran

    Three years later the world’s largest travel publisher, Lonely Planet, named it one of the Top Ten cities to visit in the world.Creating Cities is about the unlikely events in between. How a failed idea to start a bar morphed into a scheme that has helped transform Newcastle, launched more than two hundred creative and community projects across Australia and is fast becoming a model for cities and towns around the world.In an engaging, thoughtful and observational style, Marcus Westbury argues that most towns and cities are wasting their most obvious opportunities: the talent, imagination, and passion of the people that live there. In a globalised age, local creativity has access to new possibilities that most places have barely begun to grasp.Marcus weaves a local story of how identifying and fixing small scale failures in Newcastle into a larger set of ideas and “why-to” strategy with potential applications in cities and towns around the world. Creating Cities is an inspiring must read for creative people, civic and business leaders, town planners, citizens and anyone who cares about the communities that they live in.

    Hundreds of illustrations showcase every aspect of the project and its unforeseen influence in its entirety. Includes previously unpublished archival materials such as the drawings behind the original proposal and exclusive images of construction.The book mirrors the architecture and composition of the park through its large landscape format with foldouts, surprising packaging and inserts. More than a visual masterpiece – its seven chapters are well-organized, legible, comprehensive and accessible. Detailed, obsessive, quirky, compelling, and beautiful, the book captures the essence of the High Line.THE book for design enthusiasts including architects, landscape designers and urban planners - as well as for general-interest lovers of New York City, culture, art, gardens, and city life.

    The resulting exhibition, "Streetopia," was a massive anti-gentrification art fair that took place in venues throughout the city, featuring daily free talks, performances, skillshares and a free community kitchen out of the gallery. This book brings together all of the art and ephemera from the now-infamous show, featuring work by Swoon, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, Monica Canilao, Rigo 23, Xara Thustra, Ryder Cooley and many more. Essays and interviews with key participants consider the effectiveness of "Streetopia"'s projects while offering a deeper rumination on the continuing search for community in today's increasingly homogenous and gentrified cities.

    Zoning Rules! explores the behavioral basis as well as the economic effects of local government land use regulation. This requires not just an economic model of how zoning works but a deeper understanding of the social, political, and technological factors that guided its history over the last century. Zoning’s popularity is due to its success in protecting the value of single family homes, and anti-sprawl reforms must take this into account.

    Current trends show great promise for future urban mobility systems that enable freedom and connection, but not dependence. We are experiencing the phenomenon of peak car use in many global cities at the same time that urban rail is thriving, central cities are revitalizing, and suburban sprawl is reversing. Walking and cycling are growing in many cities, along with ubiquitous bike sharing schemes, which have contributed to new investment and vitality in central cities including Melbourne, Seattle, Chicago, and New York.   We are thus in a new era that has come much faster than global transportation experts Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy had predicted: the end of automobile dependence. In The End of Automobile Dependence, Newman and Kenworthy look at how we can accelerate a planning approach to designing urban environments that can function reliably and conveniently on alternative modes, with a refined and more civilized automobile playing a very much reduced and manageable role in urban transportation. The authors examine the rise and fall of automobile dependence using updated data on 44 global cities to better understand how to facilitate and guide cities to the most productive and sustainable outcomes.   This is the final volume in a trilogy by Newman and Kenworthy on automobile dependence (Cities and Automobile Dependence in 1989 and Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence in 1999). Like all good trilogies this one shows the rise of an empire, in this case that of the automobile, the peak of its power, and the decline of that empire.

    Lieutenant Michael Morse, an eighteen year veteran EMT and firefighter takes us on a compelling and emotionally charged ride through the streets of Providence, RI. Experience the heartache and joy of losing and saving lives during this incredible journey. The story that unfolds is true and the people are real.

    In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath. Rereading the history of the roundabout through the vortices of history that traverse it, the book follows the development of the roundabout in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, to its subsequent export to the colonial world in the context of attempts to discipline and police the “chaotic” non-Western city. How did an urban apparatus put in the service of authoritarian power became the locus of its undoing?Today, as the tide of revolt that characterized the Arab Spring seems to ebb, when nations and societies disintegrate by brutal civil wars and military oppression, the series of revolutions might seem like Dante’s circles of hell. To counter this counter-revolution, Weizman proposes that the immanent power of the people at the roundabouts will need to find its corollary in sustained work at round tables—the ongoing formation of political movements able to enact political change. The sixth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series stems from Eyal Weizman’s contribution to the Gwangju Folly II in 2013, an exhibition curated by Nikolaus Hirsch with Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun for the Gwangju Biennale. Weizman and the architect Samaneh Moafi constructed a folly composed of seven roundabouts and a round table in front of the Gwangju train station, one of the central points in the events of May 1980.

    These rules of thumb provide universal guidelines for the sustainable design of both buildings and the urban realm. It s a global primer and textbook for anyone interested in understanding sustainability in the built environment, an ideal starting point for students as well as an aide memoir for more experienced readers and practitioners interested in this field."

    From the strange remains of the Ziggurat of Ur dating from 2100 BC, to formidable mills of the industrial revolution, the humble brick has been an architectural staple for centuries.The world's best architects have explored the qualities of brickwork. Alvar Aalto, Antoni Gaudi, Jørn Utzon, Frank Gehry, and Mies van der Rohe all built with the material, and bricks were integral to Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for an American vernacular in his Prairie Houses.Lesser-known newcomers have created some equally striking and memorable structures, from the stunning Winery Gantenbein - built by robotic arm - to the audacious Kantana Institute, an unprecedented vision in a Thai rainforest.Brick is a beautiful and informative visual exploration of a material that is often overlooked, and sometimes considered limiting, but is actually full of spectacular potential.

    This new solid wood architecture offers unparalleled environmental as well as construction and aesthetic benefits, and is of growing importance for professionals and academics involved in green design.Solid Wood provides the first detailed book which allows readers to understand new mass timber/massive wood architecture. It provides:historical context in wood architecture from around the world a strong environmental rationale for the use of wood in buildings recent developments in contemporary fire safety and structural issues insights into building code challenges detailed case studies of new large-scale wood building systems on a country-by-country basis. Case studies from the UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia highlight design strategies, construction details and unique cultural attitudes in wood design. The case studies include the most ambitious academic, hospitality, industrial, multi-family, and wood office buildings in the world.With discussions from leading architectural, engineering, and material manufacturing firms in Europe, North America and the South Pacific, Solid Wood disrupts preconceived notions and serves as an indispensable guide to twenty-first century wood architecture and its environmental and cultural benefits.

    Cities around the world are facing the same challenges as cities in the US, and many of these problems are rooted in outdated codes and standards.   The Global Street Design Guide is a timely resource that sets a global baseline for designing streets and public spaces and redefines the role of streets in a rapidly urbanizing world. The guide will broaden how to measure the success of urban streets to include: access, safety, mobility for all users, environmental quality, economic benefit, public health, and overall quality of life. The first-ever worldwide standards for designing city streets and prioritizing safety, pedestrians, transit, and sustainable mobility are presented in the guide. Participating experts from global cities have helped to develop the principles that organize the guide. The Global Street Design Guide builds off the successful tools and tactics defined in NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide while addressing a variety of street typologies and design elements found in various contexts around the world.   This innovative guide will inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities to realize the potential in their public space networks. It will help cities unlock the potential of streets as safe, accessible, and economically sustainable places. Example cities include: Bangalore, India; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Paris, France; Copenhagen, Denmark; Seoul, Korea; Medellin, Colombia; Toronto, Canada; Istanbul, Turkey; Auckland, New Zealand; Melbourne, Australia; New York, USA; and San Francisco, USA.

    Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain, populated by people whose lives were scattered and jeopardized by the collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalism.Landscapes of Communism is an intimate history of twentieth-century communist Europe told through its buildings; it is, too, a book about power, and what power does in cities. In exploring what that power was, Hatherley shows how much we can understand from surfaces - especially states as obsessed with surface as the Soviets were. Walking through these landscapes today, Hatherley discovers how, in contrast to the common dismissal of 'monolithic' Soviet architecture, these cities reflect with disconcerting transparency the development of an idea over the decades, with its sharp, sudden zigzags of official style: from modernism to classicism and back; to the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces and secret policemen's castles; East Germany's obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant garde ever dared.But most of all, Landscapes of Communism is a revelatory journey of discovery, plunging us into the maelstrom of socialist architecture. As we submerge into the metros, walk the massive, multi-lane magistrale and pause at milk bars in the microrayons, who knows what we might find?

    Affordable Housing in New York explores the past, present, and future of the city’s pioneering efforts, from the 1920s to the major initiatives of Mayor Bill de Blasio.The book examines the people, places, and policies that have helped make New York livable, from early experiments by housing reformers and the innovative public-private solutions of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s professionalized affordable housing industry. More than two dozen leading scholars tell the story of key figures of the era, including Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and Ed Koch. Over twenty-five individual housing complexes are profiled, including Queensbridge Houses, America’s largest public housing complex; Stuyvesant Town; Co-op City; and recent additions like Via Verde. Plans, models, archival photos, and newly commissioned portraits of buildings and tenants put the efforts of the past century into social, political, and cultural context and look ahead to future prospects for below-market subsidized housing.A richly illustrated, dynamic portrait of an evolving city, this is a comprehensive and authoritative history of public and middle-income housing in New York and contributes significantly to contemporary debates on how to enable future generations of New Yorkers to call the city home.

    The cost to live in a fortress-like luxury housing complex in London or Manhattan is so high that most of us can’t afford it. As the masses move to the suburbs, the construction industry responds by churning out clusters of the same barracks-style row houses, ensuring that, there too, one can live in utmost privacy and security. But what do these buildings say about us? Do they have anything to do with the way in which most people actually want to live? Niklas Maak provocatively argues that the construction industry and a number of outdated or poorly thought-out policies have prevented us from rethinking how we live in the city. Yet many of our current crises—from the mortgage crisis to global warming—are closely connected to problematic forms of accommodation in our cities. And the problem will only get worse: Over the next twenty years, influx into the world’s cities is expected to create the need for an additional one billion units of housing. Fortunately, Maak shows, there are practicable solutions. In Europe, Japan, and the United States, the author explores promising new forms of housing. Cities should be reflections of their inhabitants—not forces to be contended with. Controversial, yet well-researched and wryly funny, Living Complex is a call for change from the “comfortable defense lines” that epitomize the current sorry state of housing.

    How can Albania activate its potential and kick-start a development strategy on the basis of the unique characteristics, cultural values, and scenic qualities of the country itself? And how can it learn from other countries and leapfrog to a sustainable development model?These questions triggered the research by design project The Metabolism of Albania – conducted by iabr/UP, 51N4E and AKPT under the umbrella of Atelier Albania and with the engagement of a coalition of Albanian, Dutch and Belgian partners: the Albanian Ministry of Urban Development and other ministries, the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the TU Delft Chair of Landscape Architecture, .FABRIC, 51N4E and IABR. The results have been presented to the Albanian Prime Minister and members of the cabinet and are currently being put into practice by the Albanian government.In this session, the book and main results are presented. With and introduction by George Brugmans (IABR) and Freek Persyn (51N4E), and contributions by among others Dirk Sijmons (HNS Landscape Architects), Adelina Greca (director AKPT), Joni Baboci (Head of Planning Tirana), Ton Dassen and Arjan Harbers (PBL), Eric Frijters and Olv Klijn (FABRICations), Sotiria Kornaropoulou and Johan Anrys (51N4E).

    Out of the Loop: Vernacular Architecture Forum Chicago is published in conjunction with the forum as a companion piece, able to expound on the forum's programs while also answering the question "Why Chicago?"A fascinating exploration of Chicago, this is an in-depth tour beyond architectural icons and into the city’s contested communities. Here the built environment remains open to new meanings. Neighborhoods hold pieces of civic structure, communal meaning, and cultural definitions. Some vernacular buildings, like the bungalow, are ready-made for occupancy and commonly produced, while still others are professionally designed. VAF not only addresses authorship but also adaptation as generations pass. In these transitions, a city steadily comes into view.Since 1980, VAF's explorations have expanded. The overlooked buildings and landscapes that continue to draw VAF together occur everywhere along the rural-to-urban spectrum. They include secular and sacred contexts in diverse locales, and they date from all time periods. The vernacular subject matter assembled by VAF continues to push the boundaries of the field of architectural history.

    In the course of their travels throughout the city's boroughs they've also taken great care to document the stories behind the scenery. The Murrays have rendered the out of the way bodegas, candy shops and record stores just as faithfully as the historically important institutions and well known restaurants, bars and cafes. From the Stonewall Inn to the Brownsville Bike Shop and The Pink Pussycat to Smith and Wolensky, the Murrays reveal how New York's beleaguered mom & pop business stand in sharp contrast to the city's rapidly evolving corporate facade. The authors' landmark 2008 book, Store Front, was recently cited in Bookforum's 20th Anniversary issue as having "demonstrated the paradoxical power of digital photo editing to alter actual views in order for us to see more clearly what is really there." James and Karla Murray live in New York City and were awarded the New York Society Library's prestigious New York City book award in 2012 for their last book, New York Nights.

    Author Karel Martens starts from the observation that for the last fifty years the focus of transportation planning and policy has been on the performance of the transport system and ways to improve it, without much attention being paid to the persons actually using – or failing to use – that transport system.There are far-reaching consequences of this approach, with some enjoying the fruits of the improvements in the transport system, while others have experienced a substantial deterioration in their situation. The growing body of academic evidence on the resulting disparities in mobility and accessibility, have been paralleled by increasingly vocal calls for policy changes to address the inequities that have developed over time. Drawing on philosophies of social justice, Transport Justice argues that governments have the fundamental duty of providing virtually every person with adequate transportation and thus of mitigating the social disparities that have been created over the past decades. Critical reading for transport planners and students of transportation planning, this book develops a new approach to transportation planning that takes people as its starting point, and justice as its end.

    From the American Dream to globalization to the digital and information revolutions, we assume that humans have taken control of our collective destinies in spite of potholes in the road such as the Great Recession of 2007-2009. However, these attitudes were formed during a unique 100-year period of human history in which a large but finite supply of fossil fuels was tapped to feed our economic and innovation engine. Today, at the peak of the Oil Age, the horizon looks different. Cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas are situated where water and other vital ecological services are scarce, and the enormous flows of resources and energy that were needed to create the megalopolises of the 20th century will prove unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, and regional impacts will become increasingly severe. Economies such as Las Vegas, which are dependent on discretionary income and buffeted by climate change, are already suffering the fate of the proverbial canary in the coal mine.Finite resources will mean profound changes for society in general and the energy-intensive lifestyles of the US and Canada in particular. But not all regions are equally vulnerable to these 21st-century megatrends. Are you ready to look beyond “America’s Most Livable Cities” to the critical factors that will determine the sustainability of your municipality and region? Find out where your city or region ranks according to the forces that will impact our lives in the next years and decades.Find out how:·resource availability and ecological services shaped the modern landscape·emerging megatrends will make cities and regions more or less livable in the new century·your city or region ranks on a “sustainability” map of the United States·urban metabolism puts large cities at particular risk·sustainability factors will favor economic solutions at a local, rather than global, level·these principles apply to industrial economies and countries globally.

    Filmmakers designed Hollywood studios with a distinct artistic and industrial mission in mind, which in turn influenced the form, content, and business of the films that were made and the impressions of the people who viewed them. The first book to retell the history of film studio architecture, Studios Before the System expands the social and cultural footprint of cinema's virtual worlds and their contribution to wider developments in global technology and urban modernism.Focusing on six significant early film corporations in the United States and France--the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, American Vitagraph, Georges M'li's's Star Films, Gaumont, and Path' Fr'res--as well as smaller producers and film companies, Studios Before the System describes how filmmakers first envisioned the space they needed and then sourced modern materials to create novel film worlds. Artificially reproducing the natural environment, film studios helped usher in the world's Second Industrial Revolution and what Lewis Mumford would later call the "specific art of the machine." From housing workshops for set, prop, and costume design to dressing rooms and writing departments, studio architecture was always present though rarely visible to the average spectator in the twentieth century, providing the scaffolding under which culture, film aesthetics, and our relation to lived space took shape.

    Reveals both the diversity of ordinary urban geographies and the networks, flows and relations which increasingly connect cities and urban spaces at the global scale Uses the city as a lens for proposing and developing critical concepts which show how wider social processes, relations, and power structures are changing Considers the experiences, lives, practices, struggles, and words of ordinary urban residents and marginalized social groups rather than exclusively those of urban elites Shows readers how to develop critical perspectives on dominant neoliberal representations of the city and explore the great diversity of urban worlds

    This book coins the term 'Mobility Revolution' and is a summary of the 'three zeroes' that are defining the future for the automobile industry: Zero Emissions, Zero Accidents and Zero Ownership. Electric, autonomous and shared vehicles are beginning to transform the way we live, work, and move about in our increasingly urban environment. The impact goes well beyond the automotive industry and its suppliers. Public transport, utilities, construction, logistics, financial services companies and even your local café will need to think and operate differently. The magnitude of the change is as significant as Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford’s transformation of our cities 130 years ago, when cars replaced horses. Lukas Neckermann describes a revolution that is coming much sooner than we think. Based on countless interviews, 'The Mobility Revolution' is highly current and thoroughly researched, whilst also fun to read. It is an eye-opener to a new world that awaits us.

    In many of the world’s major cities, however, public spaces like these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. With increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world. With Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim provides the first multidisciplinary case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city that throughout its history, her multicultural residents have built up alternative legitimacies and norms about how the sidewalk should be used. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced. In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an imaginative array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidian public space. This richly illustrated and fascinating study of Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks shows us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.

    The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.