The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one: two young citizens with no prior experience in planning and development collaborated with their neighbors, elected officials, artists, local business owners, and leaders of burgeoning movements in horticulture and landscape architecture to create a park celebrated worldwide as a model for creatively designed, socially vibrant, ecologically sound public space.Joshua David and Robert Hammond met in 1999 at a community board meeting to consider the fate of the High Line. Built in the 1930s, it carried freight trains to the West Side when the area was defined by factories and warehouses. But when trains were replaced by truck transport, the High Line became obsolete. By century's end it was a rusty, forbidding ruin. Plants grew between the tracks, giving it a wild and striking beauty.David and Hammond loved the ruin and saw in it an opportunity to create a new way to experience their city. Over ten years, they did so. In this candid and inspiring book— lavishly illustrated—they tell how they relied on skill, luck, and good timing: a crucial court ruling, an inspiring design contest, the enthusiasm of Mayor Bloomberg, the concern for urban planning issues following 9/11. Now the High Line—a half-mile expanse of plants, paths, staircases, and framed vistas—runs through a transformed West Side and reminds us that extraordinary things are possible when creative people work together for the common good.

    Today, the majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise.In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland’s models for defending against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after Hurricane Sandy. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, he argues. Rather, it lies with urban movements already fighting to remake our cities in a more just and equitable way.As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of the cities of the world.

    Sleek, legible mobility platforms are connecting people to cars, trains, buses, and bikes as never before, opening up a range of new transportation options while improving existing ones. While many large city governments, such as Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., have begun to embrace creative forms and processes of government, most still operate under the weight of an unwieldy, risk-averse bureaucracy.With the advent of self-driving vehicles and other technological shifts upon us, Gabe Klein asks how we can close the gap between the energized, aggressive world of start-ups and the complex bureaucracies struggling to change beyond a geologic time scale. From his experience as a food-truck entrepreneur to a ZipCar executive and a city transportation commissioner, Klein’s career has focused on bridging the public-private divide, finding and celebrating shared goals, and forging better cities with more nimble, consumer-oriented bureaucracies.In Start-Up City, Klein, with David Vega-Barachowitz, demonstrates how to affect big, directional change in cities—and how to do it fast. Klein's objective is to inspire what he calls “public entrepreneurship,” a start-up-pace energy within the public sector, brought about by leveraging the immense resources at its disposal.  Klein offers guidance for cutting through the morass, and a roadmap for getting real, meaningful projects done quickly and having fun while doing it.This book is for anyone who wants to change the way we live in cities without waiting for the glacial pace of change in government.

    

    The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" — with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads." He shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the "vast, flowing" Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the highly sculptural Guggenheim Bilbao and the Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome, where "simple geometries...create a work of architecture that embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination."Based on decades of looking at buildings and thinking about how we experience them, the distinguished critic raises our awareness of fundamental things like proportion, scale, space, texture, materials, shapes, light, and memory. Upon completing this remarkable architectural journey, readers will enjoy a wonderfully rewarding new way of seeing and experiencing every aspect of the built world.

    In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city's soul. A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville's and Whitman's day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today's developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.

    This book recreates the city in its teeming, unknowable variety. Part fact, part fiction, it holds up a mirror to the modern city and finds there a stage for a unique personal drama.

    Community, places of culture and business that we can walk to, mass transit and a wealth of amenities that couldn't be supported without a city's density: the mid-century drive to suburbanization deprived us of these inherent advantages of urban living. The realization of this loss, in tandem with pressing recent concerns about energy scarcity and global warming, has made us see cities with fresh eyes and a growing understanding that they can provide us with an unparalleled measure of sustainability.Ken Greenberg has not only advocated for the renewal of downtown cores, he has for thirty years designed the very means by which that renewal can happen. Walking Home is both Ken's story and a lesson in turning the world's urban spaces back into places that can give us not only a platform to face the challenges of the future, but also a place we can call, with pride and satisfaction, home.

    This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement."Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures--whether they be PTA, church, or political parties--have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam's Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.

    We live in a time when only a few gifted and dedicated teams of designers can produce buildings that approach the beauty of these that eighteenth-century carpenters created all by themselves. What went wrong? In this fascinating tour of our buildings and our social history, Jonathan Hale examines the historical moment in the 1830s when builders and architects began to lose their sense of surety about what they were doing. He explores the societal pressures that turned buildings from pure efforts at expression into structures laden with symbols. Most important, he uncovers - in terms the lay reader can easily understand - the principles that animate great architecture, no matter what its style or period. In The

    Examines the details of architectural styles from 1485 to 1996, and provides a directory of suppliers and biographical data on select architects and designers.

    But maps need not just show continents and oceans: there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, and mythological places. There are maps to popular culture, from Gulliver's Island to Gilligan's Island. There are speculative maps of the world before it was known, and maps to secret places known only to the mapmaker. Artists' maps show another kind of uncharted realm: the imagination. What all these maps have in common is their creators' willingness to venture beyond the boundaries of geography or convention.You Are Here is a wide-ranging collection of such superbly inventive maps. These are charts of places you're not expected to find, but a voyage you take in your mind: an exploration of the ideal country estate from a dog's perspective; a guide to buried treasure on Skeleton Island; a trip down the road to success; or the world as imagined by an inmate of a mental institution. With over 100 maps from artists, cartographers, and explorers, You are Here gives the reader a breath-taking view of worlds, both real and imaginary.

    His distinctive brand of architecture, usually moulded around local building traditions (especially those of Kerela, his adopted home state in south India), is instantly identifiable and has, unsurprisingly, revolutionized traditional concepts of architecture in India. Baker's architecture is responsive, uses local materials and lays stress on low-cost design.This biograpy of Laurie Baker, like his work, is direct, simple and comprehensive; further embellished with sketches, plans, photographs and some of Baker's own writings, the book offers the professional architect view of the life, methods and thoughts of an unorthodox genius.

    Even though these systems are essential, when was the last time you gave them much thought? Not only is infrastructure shrouded in mystery, much of it is woefully out of date--bridges are falling, public transportation is overcrowded, and most roads haven't been updated since the 1950s. In On the Grid, Scott Huler sets out to understand all of the systems that shape our society--from transportation, water, and garbage to the Internet coming through our cable lines.He begins his entertaining, fascinating journey at his house in Raleigh, North Carolina, and travels everywhere from the inside of a storm water pipe to the sewers of ancient Rome. Each chapter follows one element of infrastructure back to its source. Huler visits power plants, watches new asphalt pavement being laid, and traces a drop of water backward from his faucet to the Gulf of Mexico. He reaches out to guides along the way, both the workers who operate these systems and the people who plan them.A mesmerizing and hilarious narrative, On the Grid is filled with amazing insights, interviews, and stories that bring an overlooked but indispensable subject to life. You'll never look at your day the same way again.

    A companion to TIME's multi-platform documentary, the book includes 15 first person deep-dives into the lives of influential women such as General Lori Robinson, the first woman to lead troops into combat, Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space, and Aretha Franklin, the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Many others, including Oprah Winfrey, Madeline Albright, and Sheryl Sandburg offer their own personal reflections, thematic quotes and perspectives on balance, perseverance and strength.Each first-person piece or quote is accompanied by a distinctive portrait by photographer Luisa Dorr ― set up and taken on her iPhone. Others included in this unforgettable volume: Serena Williams, Ellen Degeneres, Loretta Lynch, Shonda Rimes, Nancy Pelosi, Rita Moreno, Cindy Sherman and Mo’Ne Davis.With a stirring introduction by Nancy Gibbs, herself a pioneer as the first female editor of TIME magazine, this is an inspirational book for all women and men.