Urban Design Books
Fundamentals of Sustainable Urban Design
Fundamentals of Sustainable Urban Design begins with an introduction describing current societal transformations that merit new urban designs, including depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions, large numbers of aging 'Baby Boomers,' and climate change. Dr. Friedman then examines these challenges through thirty chapters of interest to urban designers, architects, civil and construction engineers, and town planners. Each of these topics represents an aspect of urban design and describes an innovative solution and offers a detailed description of underlying principles. The highly illustrated text presents innovative urban design strategies based on sustainable principles.
Healthy Placemaking: Wellbeing Through Urban Design
In modern-day society the main threats to public health are now considered 'avoidable illnesses,' which are often caused by a lack of exercise and physical activity. Research suggests that architectural and urban design strategies play an important role in reducing the amount of avoidable illnesses by enabling physical activity through healthier streets. This book presents the path to healthier cities through six core themes - urban planning, walkable communities, neighborhood building blocks, movement networks, environmental integration and community empowerment. Each theme is presented with an overview of the issues, the solutions and how to apply them practically with exemplars and precedents.
Creating Great Places
This book provides a bold vision and roadmap for creating great places. Imagining and designing urban environments where all people thrive is an extraordinary task, and in this compelling narrative, Cushing and Miller remind us that theory is a powerful starting point. Drawing on international research, illustrated case studies, personal experiences, as well as fascinating examples from history and pop culture, this practical book provides the reader with inspiration, guidance and tools.
A Century Downtown: A Visual History of Lower Manhattan
Showcasing an unprecedented array of photographs, paintings, renderings, drawings, and other images culled from dozens of archives and individual collections worldwide, A Century Downtown ensures that no one will ever forget the vast and varied history of this famous part of New York City.
Automatic for the City: Designing for People In the Age of The Driverless Car
As we approach a new stage in our urban transformation, Automatic for the City prepares urban designers and city planners for the introduction of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), to our streets. This book is a reflection on the relationship between new technologies and urbanism, as well as an agile urban design manual with pictures illustrating potential spatial arrangements enabled by the new technologies. Two case studies in the central urban cores of London and Los Angeles are presented to show how neighborhoods can be redesigned for the better and how to apply good urban design principles across towns and cities worldwide.
The Good Metropolis
The Good Metropolis presents the first historical analysis of the productive tension between the city and the architectural form. It introduces 20th-century theories to construct a historical context from which a new architecture-city relationship emerged. The book provides a conceptual framework to understand this relationship and comes to the conclusion that urbanization may be filled with potential, i.e. be a Good Metropolis.
Designing the Global City
This text explores how architectural and urban design values have been co-opted by global cities to enhance their economic competitiveness by creating a superior built environment that is not just aesthetically memorable but more productive and sustainable. It focuses on the experience of central Sydney through its policy commitment to 'design excellence' and more particularly to mandatory competitive design processes for major private development. Framed within broader contexts that link it to comparable urban policy and design issues in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, it provides a scholarly but accessible volume that provides a balanced and critical overview of a policy that has changed the design culture, development expectations, public realm and skyline of central Sydney, raising issues surrounding the uneven distribution of benefits and costs, professional practice, representative democracy, and implications of globalization.
Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this "urban planners' dream" created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities' productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities.
Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design
Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design is the result of an eight-year research project undertaken at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The book emphasizes the value of the regular city as an open form for city design, and specifically insists that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively.
Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future
As a follow up to his widely acclaimed Sustainable Urbanism, this new book from author Douglas Farr embraces the idea that the humanitarian, population, and climate crises are three facets of one interrelated human existential challenge, one with impossibly short deadlines. The vision of Sustainable Nation is to accelerate the pace of progress of human civilization to create an equitable and sustainable world. The core strategy of Sustainable Nation is the perfection of the design and governance of all neighborhoods to make them unique exemplars of community and sustainability. The tools to achieve this vision are more than 70 patterns for rebellious change written by industry leaders of thought and practice. Each pattern represents an aspirational, future-oriented ideal for a key aspect of a neighborhood.
Loose Fit City
Drawn from a lifetime's experience of shared city-making from the bottom up, within rapidly expanding urban metabolisms in Delhi, Mumbai, Agra, Kathmandu, West Africa and London, Loose Fit City is about the ways in which city residents can learn through making to engage with the dynamic process of creating their own city. It looks at the nature and processes involved in loosely fitting together elements made by different people at different scales and times, with different intentions, into a civic entity which is greater than the sum of its parts. It shows how bottom-up learning through making can create a more vibrant and democratic city than the more flattened, top-down, centrally planned, factory made version.
Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism
In Citymakers, Cassim Shepard offers a vivid survey of how urbanism today is no longer the domain of just planners, politicians, and power brokers removed from the effects of their decisions, but an array of citizens working at the vanguard of increasingly diverse practices, from community gardeners to architects to housing advocates. Drawing on six years as the editor of Urban Omnibus, Shepard explores a broad variety of projects in New York, a city at the forefront of experimental and practical research: a constructed wetland in Staten Island, a workforce development and technology program in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a public art installation in a Bronx housing project, a housing advocacy initiative in Jackson Heights, Queens. These and a wide variety of other examples in Citymakers comprise a cross-disciplinary, from-the-ground-up approach that encourage better choices for cities of the future.
The Largest Art: A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism
Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture -- large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a "declaration of independence" for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own.
Urbanity and Density: In 20th-Century Urban Design
In the writing of urban design history of the twentieth century, functionalist and avant-garde models of the dissolution of the city are dominating. In contrast this book presents projects whose goal is the ideal of a dense and urbane city. Drawing on plans, built examples and theories of dense and urban cities and city districts in the twentieth century, modern examples of urban design are analyzed and highlighted, which until now have been evaluated more as fringe phenomena. These include examples characterized by functional mixture, social openness, spatially defined pubÂlic spaces, urban architecture, historical reference and a cultural understanding of the city.
City Riffs: Urbanism, Ecology, Place
City Riffs traces the changing perspectives of urban design within an ever-changing global context. Moving between sixteen cities, the book also considers trans-disciplinary aspects of urbanism; formal and informal growth in Kumasi and Caracas, post-colonial structures in New Delhi and Prague, post-urban phenomena in Detroit and Brussels; cultural transitions in Antwerp and Salzburg; the changing nature of place in Seoul and Mostar; and new ecological realities in New York and Rome. Urbanism is viewed as the production of space-integrating aspects of design, ecology, and engineering, as well as other influences on urban cognition such as social, economical, and psychological interactions.
Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives
Sarah Williams Goldhagen's new book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, explores how the world around us influences our day-to-day existence without our realizing. Drawing on recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, Goldhagen describes the effects that cities, landscapes, streetscapes, and buildings can have on our physical health and social lives.
Cities in Time: Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City
From street-markets and pop-up shops to art installations and Olympic parks, the temporary use of urban space is a growing international trend in architecture and urban design. Partly a response to economic and ecological crisis, it also claims to offer a critique of the status quo and an innovative way forward for the urban future. Cities in Time aims to explore and understand the phenomenon, offering a first critical and theoretical evaluation of temporary urbanism and its implications for the present and future of our cities.
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
As New York City's transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the world's greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers. Her approach was dramatic and effective: Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses. Breaking the street into its component parts, Streetfight demonstrates, with step-by-step visuals, how to rewrite the underlying "source code" of a street, with pointers on how to add protected bike paths, improve crosswalk space, and provide visual cues to reduce speeding. Achieving such a radical overhaul wasn't easy, and Streetfight pulls back the curtain on the battles Sadik-Khan won to make her approach work. She includes examples of how this new way to read the streets has already made its way around the world, from pocket parks in Mexico City and Los Angeles to more pedestrian-friendly streets in Auckland and Buenos Aires, and innovative bike-lane designs and plazas in Austin, Indianapolis, and San Francisco.
Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way-as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.
Rooftops: Islands in the Sky
As urban living intensifies in density and numbers, the city landscape expands both outwards and upwards. Architects and urban designers craft new and experimental structures while also investigating existing buildings for potential reinvention or expansion. In particular, the roof of a building, once a perfunctory structural element, is now a city space in and of itself, beloved for the capacity to eke out further room for living or to craft inspiring refuges away from the bustle of the metropolis. This international selection of urban rooftops catalogs a new urban dimension. Through over 50 bars, restaurants, temporary art installations, and gardens, it testifies to the variety of intelligent and exuberant designs that grace city summits from Sydney to Hong Kong, Oslo to Chicago.
City of Well-being: A Radical Guide to Planning
City of Well-being provides a radical and holistic introduction to the science and art of town planning. It starts from the premise that the purpose of planning is the health, well-being and sustainable quality of life of people. Drawing on current and historic examples it offers inspiration, information and an integrated perspective which challenges all professions and decision-makers that affect the urban environment.
Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities
Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities connects the study of design with care, and explores how concepts of care may have relevance for the ways in which urban environments are designed. It explores how practices and spaces of care are sustained specifically in urban settings, thereby throwing light on an important arena of care that current work has rarely discussed in detail.
The Flexible City: Sustainable Solutions for a Europe in Transition
In Europe, the period of great economic and demographic growth is largely over. Unlike in Latin America, Asia or Africa, the boundaries of European cities are no longer expanding, but have essentially come to a halt. Instead of building new spaces outside city lines, now the more urgent task is making what already exists sustainable. The Flexible City addresses this new mandate for those working on the future of the European city: maintaining and restructuring the existing city. In this volume, authors Tom Bergevoet and Maarten van Tuijl analyze this trend and compare European cities, identifying similarities and describing concrete examples in detail, offering inspiration and practical guidance to the administrators, policymakers, developers, designers, builders and users shaping Europe's urban future.
Urban Design Thinking: A Conceptual Toolkit
Urban Design Thinking provides a conceptual toolkit for urban design. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it shows how the design of our cities and urban spaces can be interpreted and informed through contemporary theories of urbanism, architecture and spatial analysis.
Planning Sustainable Cities: An Infrastructure-based Approach
Planning Sustainable Cities: An infrastructure-based approach provides an analytical framework for urban sustainability, focusing on the services and performance of infrastructure systems. The book approaches infrastructure as a series of systems that function in synergy and are directly linked with urban planning.
Retailising Space: Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation of Public Space (Ashgate Studies in Architecture)
The traditional spaces of retail, such as city centres and outlying shopping malls, are either increasing in size or disappearing, producing new urban types and whole environments totally dedicated to retail. The creation of these new retail spaces has brought about a re- and de-territorialisation of urban public space, and has also led to transformations in urban design and type of materials used, and even in the logic and ways through which these design amenities meet the needs of retailers and/or consumers. This book describes how the retailisation of public domains affects our everyday life and our use of the built environment.
The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950-1980
American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists' enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment.
Rebuilding the American City: Design and Strategy for the 21st Century Urban Core
Urban redevelopment in American cities is neither easy nor quick. It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns―yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century.
Essentials of Urban Design
Essentials of Urban Design explains the fundamental concepts of urban design, providing the understanding and tools needed to achieve better design outcomes. It is equally useful for designing places and evaluating designs.
Research Design in Urban Planning: A Student's Guide
Research Design in Urban Planning: A Student's Guide is a brilliantly accessible guide to designing research for that all-important dissertation. Packed with case studies, exercises, illustrations and summaries, Research Design in Urban Planning is an invaluable resource for students undertaking their first substantial, individual investigations.