Urban Design Books
Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Design
Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Design explains how to design spaces for pedestrians while also accommodating transit needs. Written by a noted expert on pedestrian design and planning, this handbook contains examples of zoning codes from different localities.
Cycle Space: Architecture and Urban Design in the Age of the Bicycle
Cycle Space: Architecture and Urban Design in the Age of the Bicycle is the first book to view the city through the lens of the bicycle. The book features portraits of eight major cities and their respective cycling cultures: New York, Chicago, Portland, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Budapest, Sao Paolo, Singapore and Sydney.
Creating Smart-er Cities
Drawing together the critical insights from papers from a collection of leading international experts on the transition to smart cities, this book proposes to do what has recently been asked of those responsible for creating Smarter Cities. That is: provide the definitional components, critical insights and institutional means by which to get beyond the all too often self-congratulatory tone cities across the world strike when claiming to be smart and by focusing on the critical role master-plans and design codes play in supporting the sustainable development of communities.
Urban Spaces: Plazas, Squares and Streetscapes
Public urban spaces vary widely in type, form and size, encompassing plazas, squares and streetscapes. Urban Spaces features recent projects from all continents, showing the different approaches and solutions to this sophisticated design task at the intersection of architecture, landscape design and urban planning.
City Catalyst
Favoring an inclusive way of viewing the city, no aspect of the urban world is any longer rejected outright, and architects and urban designers instead find potential and learn from the underlying dynamics of the contemporary city. This attitude highlights the generative capacities of the city and finds new ways of engaging it. At the very least, it advances an architectural thinking that engages the city on its own ground, abets its potential and seeks opportunities in the existing condition.
In the Life of Cities
In the Life of Cities: Parallel Narratives of the Urban addresses the complex relations between urban artifacts and urban life. The contributions show how architects, planners, and urban designers describe and give shape to the city, while novelists, humanists, and other scholars examine its operations and performances.
Sourcebook of Contemporary Urban Design
Sourcebook of Contemporary Urban Design presents more than 300 noteworthy case studies in its 600 pages. The case studies incorporate many types of urban space projects, indoor and outdoor, including a succinct description of the project at hand, listing its name, client, and location and presenting its unique objectives, challenges, and solutions.
Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products
Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to urban design, presenting a 3 dimensional model with which to categorise the processes and products involved. It not only defines the subject, but also considers the future direction of the field and what can be learned from the past.
Sprawling Cities and Our Endangered Public Health
Sprawling Cities and Our Endangered Public Health examines the past and present role of architecture in relation to the public health consequences of unmitigated sprawl and the ways in which it threatens our future. Topics examined include the role of twentieth century theories of architecture and urbanism and their public health ramifications, examples of current unsustainable practices, design considerations for the creation of health-promoting architecture and landscape urbanism, a critique of recent case studies of sustainable alternatives to unchecked sprawl, and prognostications for the future.
Urban Design: Street and Square
Urban Design: Street and Square offers a detailed analysis of urban design, covering the streets, squares and buildings that make up the public face of towns and cities. It outlines the theory of the principal features of urban design from which method is developed and provides a better understanding of the main elements of urban design.
Planning Ideas That Matter
Over the past hundred years of urbanization and suburbanization, four key themes have shaped urban and regional planning in both theory and practice: livability, territoriality, governance, and reflective professional practice. Planning Ideas That Matter charts the trajectories of these powerful planning ideas in an increasingly interconnected world.
Urban Design: Green Dimensions
Urban Design: Green Dimensions explores sustainable development and green design in relation to urban structure and built form.
Masterplanning Futures
Drawing on first-hand accounts and illustrated throughout with colour photographs, plans and visualizations, Masterplanning Futures includes twenty essays introduced by an extensive overview of the field and its objectives. These investigate plans including one-north Singapore, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, Xochimilco in Mexico City and Waterfront Seattle, illuminating their distinct yet complementary integrated strategies.
Going Public: Public Architecture, Urbanism and Interventions
Going Public: Public Architecture, Urbanism and Interventions showcases the creative revival of public space in our urban and rural landscapes. The book's compelling selection of formal and informal interventions, reclamations, and architecture illustrates the current scope and interest in refashioning and repurposing our built environment for public use. Ranging from bold to subtle and from temporary to permanent, the architecture and urban design featured in the book offers inspiring and surprising interpretations of our public surroundings and natural landscapes.
Lo Cal City
Lo Cal City aggressively uncovers embedded radical efficiencies in a place - the true local in a locale - and posits how cities can minimize the metabolism of energy while maximizing the design and experience of architecture.
Metropolitan Landscape Architecture
Metropolitan Landscape Architecture sketches the development of the urban landscape from the Renaissance to the present. The examples include urban landscapes and parks in Rome, Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Boston, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne.
Environmental Psychology for Design
How does a room affect an occupant's behavior and well-being? How does a building influence its residents' health? Environmental Psychology for Design explores these questions with an in-depth look at psychosocial responses to the built environment. The book provides many proactive initiatives designed to minimize stress and maximize user satisfaction, helping readers to create more comfortable spaces that will both satisfy the needs of the intended occupants and expand the scope of design.
Moderators of Change: Architecture That Helps
As living conditions among the world's poor continue to decline, with more and more people occupying slums and shantytowns, architects and artists are attempting to apply new models of collaboration and sustainability to social crisis. Moderators of Change: Architecture That Helps showcases 20 international projects by architects, designers and artists that provide socially responsible models of urban design.
Water Sensitive Urban Design
In recent years, decentralized stormwater management has come to the forefront of debates on sustainable urban design. Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) aims to harmonize the urban built environment and urban water systems.
Detroit: 138 Square Miles
Over the past six years, documentary photographer and architectural historian Julia Reyes Taubman has taken more than 30,000 photographs across the sprawled terrain of Detroit, ambitiously mapping out a comprehensive survey of a major American city. More than a photographic saturation job of a single city, Detroit: 138 Square Miles provides contextual perspective in an extended caption section in which Reyes Taubman collaborated with University of Michigan professors Robert Fishman and Michael McCullough to emphasize the social imperatives driving her documentation.
Infrastructural Urbanism
Infrastructural Urbanism: Designing the Peripheries discusses spatial design implications of technical and transport infrastructure. The authors look at projects of various scales - from skate parks to urban highways - in many different cities - Mexico City, New York, London, Paris, Zurich, Seattle, Barcelona, Stockholm, Sao Paulo, Antwerp. They demonstrate that infrastructure generates its own category of urban realm.
Climate Change and Cities
Urban areas are home to over half the world's people and are at the forefront of the climate change issue. The need for a global research effort to establish the current understanding of climate change adaptation and mitigation at the city level is urgent. To meet this goal a coalition of international researchers - the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) - was formed at the time of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in New York in 2007. This book is the First UCCRN Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities.
Carrot City
Carrot City is a collection of ideas, both conceptual and realized, that use design to enable sustainable food production, helping to reintroduce urban agriculture to our cities. Forty projects demonstrate how the production of food can lead to visually striking and artistically interesting solutions that create community and provide inhabitants with immediate access to fresh, healthful ingredients.
Rising Currents
Published to document the exhibition, Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront presents five projects in detail through essays that summarize the innovative workshop and exhibition, the dialogues they engendered with outside experts and political figures involved in regional planning, and the climate change and urban planning implications of the proposed solutions.
Game Urbanism
Hans Venhuizen is a specialist in what he calls culture-based planning, which takes existing culture - architecture, art and the contemporary culture of an area's inhabitants - as the point of departure for planning efforts. Venhuizen is well known for his use of ingenious large-scale social games to identify the culture and explore the interests at stake: one such game, called "Life, the Game," involved 20 participants in reenacting the entire life cycle. Game Urbanism: Handbook of Processes of Spatial Change presents Venhuizen's working practices and shows how they can be applied by anybody (citizens, planners, artists, architects, local authorities, administrators) working in spatial planning, architecture, community arts or other creative industries.
Understanding Cities
Understanding Cities is richly textured, complex and challenging. It creates the vital link between urban design theory and praxis and opens the required methodological gateway to a new and unified field of urban design. Using spatial political economy as his most important reference point, Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis.
Urban Design: The Composition of Complexity
For planning to be successful, design must mean more than simply blindly following the dictates of legislation and regulation - yet losing sight of the importance of the design process is all too often exactly what has happened. The book identifies the elements and principles of composition and explores compositional order and structure as they relate to the meaning and functionality of cities. It discusses new directions and methods, outlines the importance of both buildings and the open spaces between them.
Drawing for Urban Design
Drawing for Urban Design explores a wide range of ways to represent the city, from freehand sketching to sophisticated computer models.
Urban Design Since 1945
Urban Design Since 1945: A Global Perspective reviews the emergence of urban design as a global phenomenon.
High Performance Landscape Guidelines
High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC is the first document of its kind in the nation: a comprehensive, municipal primer for sustainable parks and open space. The Guidelines cover every aspect of creating sustainable parks, from design to construction to maintenance, and feature hundreds of best practices for managing soil, water, and vegetation resources, as well as dozens of full color photos and illustrations.