Book picks similar to
Nothing Gained by Overcrowding by Raymond Unwin


planning
_read-3-later
architecture
urban-planning

Urban Economics


Arthur O'Sullivan - 1990
    This book covers urban economics as the discipline that lies at the intersection of geography and economics. The sixth edition is a thorough revision of previous incarnations - the author has reorganized and rewritten every chapter, to produce a sleek and up-to-date text that will bring renewed attention to the Urban Economics course. This sixth edition offers an extreme makeover from previous editions, while also incorporating the remarkable progress in the field of urban economics in the last ten to fifteen years. Part I of the book explains why cities exist and what causes them to grow or shrink.

Learn to Timber Frame: Craftsmanship, Simplicity, Timeless Beauty


Will Beemer - 2016
    Using full-color photos, detailed drawings, and clear step-by-step instructions, Beemer shows you exactly how to build one small (12ʹ x 16ʹ) timber-frame structure — suitable for use as a cabin, workshop, or studio. He also explains how to modify the structure to suit your needs and location by adding a loft, moving doors or windows, changing the roof pitch, or making the frame larger or smaller. You’ll end up with a beautiful building as well as solid timber-framing skills that you can use for a lifetime.

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir


D.J. Waldie - 1996
    In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way in which a place can shape a life, Holy Land is ultimately about the resonance of choices—how wide a street should be, what to name a park—and the hopes that are realized in the habits of everyday life.

The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future


Ben Green - 2019
    We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be "smart enough" to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change--but not to value technology as an end in itself.In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

Gentrifier


John Joe Schlichtman - 2017
    In this lively yet rigorous book, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill take a close look at the socioeconomic factors and individual decisions behind gentrification and their implications for the displacement of low-income residents. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the authors present interviews, case studies, and analysis in the context of recent scholarship in such areas as urban sociology, geography, planning, and public policy. As well, they share accounts of their first-hand experience as academics, parents, and spouses living in New York City, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Providence. With unique insight and rare candour, GENTRIFIER challenges readers' current understandings of gentrification and their own roles within their neighborhoods. A foreword by Peter Marcuse opens the volume.  REVIEWS"Gentrifier is the sort of book that vintage, pre-Kardashian Kanye West might have written had he had a PhD in urban policy, supplying it with an irresistible hook: "We're all gentrifiers, I'm just the first to admit it." Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill help us shelve what we thought we knew about gentrification, and give us instead a brutally honest reckoning with the ills, conveniences and virtues – but especially the consequences on the vulnerable – of gentrification. They ably wrestle with a characteristic facet of modern existence, rescuing the term from automatic demonization while never once letting it off the hook for the damage it can do."–Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and author of 'Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America'“In their book Gentrifier, instead of trying to solve the gentrification Rubik’s cube, they decide to pull it apart, block-by-block, naming each part and its role in neighborhood change. The book provides not only a glossary of terms, but also tools and rules of engagement for deploying this thing that—if we can all agree on nothing else—has now become a fully loaded and weaponized word. The function of this breakdown is that by using a more scrupulous lexicon for describing the changes happening to one’s neighborhood or environment, legislators and regulators can be more responsive and accurate in their policy proposals.”–from CityLab’s Books That Influenced Us in 2017, Brentin Mock"The co-authors of Gentrifier take a daring tack: Professors all, they break the third wall of social science..." –from the New York Times Book Review, Daniel Brook"By making themselves and their choices part of the analysis, they have produced a unique and important contribution to the progressive literature on gentrification, one that truly does work in the much-sought middle ground between supply and demand side explanations of this form of urban change." –from Antipode Journal, Amy Starecheski"This book will provoke outrage among many gentrification scholars. But it provides a welcome corrective to the slap-dash way ‘gentrification’ is used an explanatory force in popular narratives and some scholarship. The…price puts it just within reach of the interested general reader, who I would encourage to read it. It would also be a valuable addition to reading lists on urban studies, urban geography and urban planning."–from LSE Review of Books, Peter Matthews"Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill present a rich discussion of gentrification as a socio-economic force—touching on much more than soft complaints about tall condos, disappearing neighbourhood bookshops, and $8 lattes …The book encourages us to look inward, arming us with tools and experience to dissect our ideologies to better understand gentrification and gentrifiers."–from Spacing Magazine"Gentrifier, a co-written effort by John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill, takes a slightly different approach, and one that was most enjoyable to read. It’s a more nuanced take on what it means to join an existing community..."–from Curbed, Alissa Walker"Gentrifier does a masterful job of explaining, unpacking, and grounding the key analytical concepts that underpin debates on gentrification. In clear, readable, and entertaining prose, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill make gentrification more tangible and relevant as an important social topic worthy of rigorous and careful understanding."–John L. Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Professor and Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania"John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill clearly engage in the theoretical and policy debates surrounding gentrification while offering very smart analyses of their own narratives. There is a lot out there on gentrification but Gentrifier is most definitely fresh!"–Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Northwestern University

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto


Sudhir Venkatesh - 2000
    A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex.Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

Walkscapes: El andar como práctica estética/Walking as an Aesthetic Practice


Francesco Careri - 2005
    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.

Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary


Dan Hill - 2012
    With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to "big picture" systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics – the “dark matter” – taking place above the designer’s head. And that may mean redesigning the organisation that hires you.

Headspace: The Psychology of City Living


Paul Keedwell - 2017
     More and more of us are choosing to live in the man-made environment of the city. The mismatch between this artificial world and our nature-starved souls can contribute to the stresses of city living in a way that is barely noticed – but is crucially important.What does the science of architectural psychology tell us about how the world of brick and concrete affects how we think, feel and behave?In an increasingly crowded urban world, how does good urban design inspire, restore and bring us together? Conversely, how does bad architecture cause anxiety, alienation and depression?Starting with the home and reaching out to the street, neighbourhood and wider city landscape, Headspace teaches us how to see our cities differently, and how we can best adapt to our rapidly changing urban world.

Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development


Manfredo Tafuri - 1976
    It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City


Peter D. Norton - 2008
    By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.