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Why Cities Look The Way They Do
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Book Synopsis Why Cities Look the Way They Do by : Richard J. Williams
Download or read book Why Cities Look the Way They Do written by Richard J. Williams and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to think cities look the way they do because of the conscious work of architects, planners and builders. But what if the look of cities had less to do with design, and more to do with social, cultural, financial and political processes, and the way ordinary citizens interact with them? What if the city is a process as much as a design? Richard J. Williams takes the moment construction is finished as a beginning, tracing the myriad processes that produce the look of the contemporary global city. This book is the story of dramatic but unforeseen urban sights: how financial capital spawns empty towering skyscrapers and hollowed-out ghettoes; how the zoning of once-illicit sexual practices in marginal areas of the city results in the reinvention of culturally vibrant gay villages; how abandoned factories have been repurposed as creative hubs in a precarious postindustrial economy. It is also the story of how popular urban clichés and the fictional portrayal of cities powerfully shape the way we read and see the bricks, concrete and glass that surround us. Thought-provoking and original, Why Cities Look the Way They Do will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the contemporary city, shedding new light on humanity’s greatest collective invention.
Book Synopsis The Image of the City by : Kevin Lynch
Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Download or read book Feminist City written by Leslie Kern and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Download or read book Cities by Design written by Fran Tonkiss and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who makes our cities, and what part do everyday users have in the design of cities? This book powerfully shows that city-making is a social process and examines the close relationship between the social and physical shaping of urban environments. With cities taking a growing share of the global population, urban forms and urban experience are crucial for understanding social injustice, economic inequality and environmental challenges. Current processes of urbanization too often contribute to intensifying these problems; cities, likewise, will be central to the solutions to such problems. Focusing on a range of cities in developed and developing contexts, Cities by Design highlights major aspects of contemporary urbanization: urban growth, density and sustainability; inequality, segregation and diversity; informality, environment and infrastructure. Offering keen insights into how the shaping of our cities is shaping our lives, Cities by Design provides a critical exploration of key issues and debates that will be invaluable to students and scholars in sociology and geography, environmental and urban studies, architecture, urban design and planning.
Download or read book Invented Cities written by Mona Domosh and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do cities look the way they do? In this intriguing new book, Mona Domosh seeks to answer this question by comparing the strikingly different landscapes of two great American cities, Boston and New York. Although these two cities appeared to be quite similar through the eighteenth century, distinctive characteristics emerged as social and economic differences developed. Domosh explores the physical differences between Boston and New York, comparing building patterns and architectural styles to show how a society's vision creates its own distinctive urban form. Cities, Domosh contends, are visible representations of individual and group beliefs, values, tensions, and fears. Using an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses economics, politics, architecture, historical and cultural geography, and urban studies, Domosh shows how the middle and upper classes of Boston and New York, the "building elite," inscribed their visions of social order and social life on four landscape features during the latter half of the nineteenth century: New York's retail district and its commercial skyscrapers, and Boston's Back Bay and its Common and park system. New York's self-expression translated into unlimited commercial and residential expansion, conspicuous consumption, and architecture designed to display wealth and prestige openly. Boston, in contrast, focused more on culture. The urban gentry limited skyscraper construction, prevented commercial development of Boston Common, and maintained homes and parks near the business district. Many fascinating lithographs illustrate the two cities' contrasting visions.
Download or read book Radical Cities written by Justin McGuirk and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.
Book Synopsis Cities Are Good for You by : Leo Hollis
Download or read book Cities Are Good for You written by Leo Hollis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are where the twenty-first century is really going to happen. Already at the beginning of the century, we became 50% urban as a global population, and by 2050 we're going to be up to 70% urban. So cities could either be our coffin or our ark. Leo Hollis presents evidence that cities can deliver a better life and a better world in the future. From exploring what slime mold can tell us about traffic flow, to looking at how traditional civic power structures are being overturned by Twitter, to investigating how cities all over the world are tackling climate change, population growth, poverty, shifting work patterns and the maintenance of the fragile trust of their citizens, Cities Are Good for You offers a new perspective on the city. Combining anecdote, scientific studies, historical portraits, first-hand interviews and observations of some of the most exciting world cities, Hollis upends long-held assumptions with new questions: Where do cities come from? Can we build a city from scratch? Does living in the city make you happier or fitter? Is the metropolis of the future female? What is the relationship between cities and creativity? And are slums really all that bad? Cities Are Good for You introduces us to dreamers, planners, revolutionaries, writers, scientists, architects, slum-dwellers and kings. Ranging globally and through time in search of answers--from the archive to the laboratory, from City Hall to the architect's desk--it is above all driven by the idea that cities are for people and by people.
Book Synopsis The Heart of the City by : Alexander Garvin
Download or read book The Heart of the City written by Alexander Garvin and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles. In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts--of both successes and failures--of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.
Book Synopsis Looking at Cities by : Allan B. Jacobs
Download or read book Looking at Cities written by Allan B. Jacobs and published by . This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allan Jacobs has written a city planning book for everyone with a passion for urban environments. His message--conveyed in word and vivid image--is that the people who make changes in cities base their decisions upon what they see, and that their visions and actions, which affect the lives of millions, have too often been faulty. Jacobs shows us how to read cities by identifying and discussing the many visual clues and their various meanings in different environments.
Book Synopsis Imaginary Cities by : Darran Anderson
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Book Synopsis Prophetic City by : Stephen L. Klineberg
Download or read book Prophetic City written by Stephen L. Klineberg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Houston, Texas, long thought of as a traditionally blue-collar black/white southern city, has transformed into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metro areas in the nation, surpassing even New York by some measures. With a diversifying economy and large numbers of both highly-skilled technical jobs in engineering and medicine and low-skilled minimum-wage jobs in construction, restaurant work, and personal services, Houston has become a magnet for the new divergent streams of immigration that are transforming America in the 21st century. And thanks to an annual systematic survey conducted over the past thirty-eight years, the ongoing changes in attitudes, beliefs, and life experiences have been measured and studied, creating a compelling data-driven map of the challenges and opportunities that are facing Houston and the rest of the country. In Prophetic City, we'll meet some of the new Americans, including a family who moved to Houston from Mexico in the early 1980s and is still trying to find work that pays more than poverty wages. There's a young man born to highly-educated Indian parents in an affluent Houston suburb who grows up to become a doctor in the world's largest medical complex, as well as a white man who struggles with being prematurely pushed out of the workforce when his company downsizes. This timely and groundbreaking book tracks the progress of an American city like never before. Houston is at the center of the rapid changes that have redefined the nature of American society itself in the new century. Houston is where, for better or worse, we can see the American future emerging.
Book Synopsis The City-State of Boston by : Mark Peterson
Download or read book The City-State of Boston written by Mark Peterson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vaunted annals of America's founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary "city upon a hill" and the "cradle of liberty" for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clich s, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston's overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston's development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain's Stuart monarchs and how--through its bargain with slavery and ratification of the Constitution - it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar alongside well-known figures, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston's origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain's empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, "Bostoners" aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston's regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state's vision of a common good for all. Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America's history.
Download or read book Planet of Cities written by Shlomo Angel and published by Lincoln Inst of Land Policy. This book was released on 2012 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 4,000 cities on our planet today have populations of 100,000 people or more. We know their names, locations, and approximate populations from maps and other data sources, but there is little comparable knowledge about all these cities, and none that can be described as rigorously scientific. The Planet of Cities together with its companion volume, the Atlas of Urban Expansion, contributes to developing a science of cities based on studying all these cities together—not in the abstract, but with a view to preparing them for their coming expansion. The book puts into question the main tenets of the familiar Containment Paradigm, also known as smart growth, urban growth management, or compact city, that is designed to contain boundless urban expansion, typically decried as sprawl. It examines this paradigm in a broader global perspective and shows it to be deficient and practically useless in addressing the central questions now facing expanding cities outside the United States and Europe. In its place Shlomo Angel proposes to revive an alternative Making Room Paradigm that seeks to come to terms with the expected expansion of cities, particularly in the rapidly urbanizing countries in Asia and Africa, and to make the minimally necessary preparations for such expansion instead of seeking to contain it. This paradigm is predicated on four propositions:1. The expansion of cities that urban population growth entails cannot be contained. Instead we must make adequate room to accommodate it.2. City densities must remain within a sustainable range. If density is too low, it must be allowed to increase, and if it is too high, it must be allowed to decline.3. Strict containment of urban expansion destroys the homes of the poor and puts new housing out of reach for most people. Decent housing for all can be ensured only if urban land is in ample supply.4. As cities expand, the necessary land for public streets, public infrastructure networks, and public open spaces must be secured in advance of development.The first part of the book explores planetary urbanization in a historical and geographical perspective, to establish a global perspective for the study of cities. It confirms that we are in the midst of an urbanization project that started in earnest at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has now reached its peak with half the world population residing in urban areas, and will come to a close, possibly by the end of this century, when most people who want to live in cities will have moved there. This realization lends urgency to the call for preparing for urban expansion now, when the urbanization project is still in full swing, rather than later, when it would be too late to make a difference.The second part of the book seeks to deepen our understanding and thus lessen our fear of urban expansion by providing detailed quantitative answers to seven sets of questions regarding the dimensions and attributes of urban expansion:1. What are the extents of urban areas everywhere and how fast are they expanding over time?2. How dense are these urban areas and how are urban densities changing over time?3. How centralized are the residences and workplaces in cities and do they tend to disperse to the periphery over time? 4. How fragmented are the built-up areas of cities and how are levels of fragmentation changing over time?5. How compact are the shapes of urban footprints and how are their levels of compactness changing over time?6. How much land would urban areas require in future decades?7. How much cultivated land will be consumed by expanding urban areas?By answering these questions and exploring their implications for action, this book provides the conceptual framework, basic empirical data, and practical agenda necessary for the minimal yet meaningful management of the urban expansion process.The companion volume, Atlas of Urban Expansion, was also authored by Lincoln Institute visiting fellow Shlomo “
Book Synopsis The Topography of Wellness by : Sara Jensen Carr
Download or read book The Topography of Wellness written by Sara Jensen Carr and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic has re-ignited discussions of how architects, landscapes, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called "social diseases" of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today's chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape.
Download or read book Close-Up written by Grady Clay and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1980-04-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Grady Clay looks hard at the landscape, finding out who built what and why, noticing who participates in a city's success and who gets left in a 'sink,' or depressed (often literally) area. Clay doesn't stay in the city; he looks at industrial towns, truck stops, suburbs—nearly anywhere people live or work. His style is witty and readable, and the book is crammed with illustrations that clarify his points. If I had to pick up one book to guide my observations of the American scene, this would be it."—Sonia Simone, Whole Earth Review "The emphasis on the informal aspects of city-shaping—topographical, historical, economic and social—does much to counteract the formalist approach to American urban design. Close-Up...should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand Americans and their cities."—Roger Cunliffe, Architectural Review "Close-Up is a provocative and stimulating book."—Thomas J. Schlereth, Winterthur Portfolio "Within this coherent string of essays, the urban dweller or observer, as well as the student, will find refreshing strategies for viewing the environmental 'situations' interacting to form a landscape."—Dallas Morning News "Clay's Close-Up, first published in 1973, is still a key book for looking at the real American city. Too many urban books and guidebooks concentrate on the good parts of the city....Clay looks at all parts of the city, the suburbs, and the places between cities, and develops new terms to describe parts of the built environment—fronts, strips, beats, stacks, sinks, and turf. No one who wants to understand American cities or to describe them, should fail to know this book. The illustrations are of special interest to the guidebook writer."—American Urban Guidenotes
Book Synopsis The Fear and the Freedom by : Keith Lowe
Download or read book The Fear and the Freedom written by Keith Lowe and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling historian Keith Lowe's The Fear and the Freedom looks at the astonishing innovations that sprang from WWII and how they changed the world. The Fear and the Freedom is Keith Lowe’s follow-up to Savage Continent. While that book painted a picture of Europe in all its horror as WWII was ending, The Fear and the Freedom looks at all that has happened since, focusing on the changes that were brought about because of WWII—simultaneously one of the most catastrophic and most innovative events in history. It killed millions and eradicated empires, creating the idea of human rights, and giving birth to the UN. It was because of the war that penicillin was first mass-produced, computers were developed, and rockets first sent to the edge of space. The war created new philosophies, new ways of living, new architecture: this was the era of Le Corbusier, Simone de Beauvoir and Chairman Mao. But amidst the waves of revolution and idealism there were also fears of globalization, a dread of the atom bomb, and an unexpressed longing for a past forever gone. All of these things and more came about as direct consequences of the war and continue to affect the world that we live in today. The Fear and the Freedom is the first book to look at all of the changes brought about because of WWII. Based on research from five continents, Keith Lowe’s The Fear and the Freedom tells the very human story of how the war not only transformed our world but also changed the very way we think about ourselves.
Book Synopsis Remedy Network by : J. Caleb Perkins
Download or read book Remedy Network written by J. Caleb Perkins and published by J. Caleb Perkins. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: REMEDY NETWORK is a practical guide for millennials who desire the courage to start an initiative of change and share their story. J. Caleb began Remedy Network Inc. after hearing the devastating news of Kalief Browder's suicide that occurred in the summer of 2015. Caleb left his corporate job at 23 years old and moved to New York City to begin Remedy. His vision is to see properly resourced millennials who are equipped to reach their personal and professional goals, well-rounded in their mental health and educated in all spheres of societal influence.
