Understanding the City PDF Download

Author: John Eade
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444399322
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
This cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary analysis looks ahead to the direction which urban studies is likely to take during the twenty-first century.

Author: John Eade
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 0470692847
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary analysis looks ahead to the direction which urban studies is likely to take during the twenty-first century.

Author: Alexander R. Cuthbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415608236
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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, Alexander Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis. He rejects the idea of yet another theory in urban design, and chooses instead to construct the necessary intellectual and conceptual scaffolding for what he terms 'The New Urban Design'. Building both on Michel de Certeau's concept of heterology - 'thinking about thinking' - and on the framework of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities, Cuthbert uses his prior adopted framework - history, philosophy, politics, culture, gender, environment, aesthetics, typologies and pragmatics - to create three integrated texts. Overall, the trilogy allows a new field of urban design to emerge. Pre-existing and new knowledge are integrated across all three volumes, of which Understanding Cities is the culminating text.

Author: Peter Bosselmann
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610911490
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew. Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting. He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.

Author: Anne Mikoleit
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262016419
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A primer in urban literacy that teaches us in words and pictures what to notice if we want to understand the city. Cities speak, and this little book helps us understand their language. Considering the urban landscape not from the abstract perspective of an urban planner but from the viewpoint of an attentive observer, Urban Code offers 100 “lessons”—maxims, observations, and bite-size truths, followed by short essays—that teach us how to read the city. This is a user's guide to the city, a primer of urban literacy, at the pedestrian level. The reader (like the observant city stroller) can move from “People walk in the sunshine” (lesson 1) to “Street vendors are positioned according to the path of the sun” (lesson 2); consider possible connections between the fact that “Locals and tourists use the streets at different times” (lesson 41) and “Tourists stand still when they're looking at something” (lesson 68); and weigh the apparent contradiction of lesson 73, “Nightlife hotspots increase pedestrian traffic” and lesson 74, “People are afraid of the dark.” A lesson may seem self-evident (“Grocery stores are important local destinations”—of course they are!) but considered in the context of other lessons, it becomes part of a natural logic. With Urban Code, we learn what to notice if we want to understand the city. We learn to detect patterns in the relationships between people and the urban environment. Each lesson is accompanied by an icon-like image; in addition to these 100 drawings, thirty photographs of street scenes illustrate the text. The photographs are stills from films shot in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo; the lessons are inspired by the authors' observations of SoHo, but hold true for any cityscape.

Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

Author: Li Shiqiao
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473905397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"One thing is clear: in marginalising Chinese tradition and falling short of wholesale importation of Western cultural and political ideals and institutions, Chinese cities have become, in one sense, the scrapyard of half-hearted emulations and acts of resistance, appearing to be neither here nor there...” - Li Shiqiao, writing in the South China Morning Post This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by: examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers exploring the meanings of labour, and the resultant numerical and financial hierarchies demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the conceptions of numerical distributions, safety networks, and aesthetic orders. Understanding the Chinese City elegantly traces a thread between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations, revealing hidden continuities that show how instrumental the past has been in forming the present. It contextualizes Chinese urban experiences in relation to familiar intellectual landmarks. Rather than becoming obstacles to change, ancient practices have become effective strategies of adaptation under radically new terms.

Author: Rob Sullivan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351110136
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The Metaphysical City examines the metaphorical existence of the city as an entity to further understand its significance on urban planning and geography. It encourages an open-minded approach when studying cities so as to uncover broader connecting themes that may otherwise be missed. Case studies of New York, Paris, Cairo, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Los Angeles explore a metaphor specific to each city. This multidisciplinary analysis uses philosophical treatises, geographical analysis, and comparative literature to uncover how each city corresponds to the metaphor. As such, it allows the reader to understand the city from six differing points of view. This book would be beneficial to students and academics of urban planning, geography, and comparative literature, in particular those with an interest in a metaphysical examination of cities.

Author: Gülçin Erdi-Lelandais
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443863203
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Henri Lefebvre is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers in the field of urban space and its organization; his theories offer reflections still valid for analyzing social relations in urban areas affected by the crisis of the neoliberal economic system. Lefebvre’s ideal of the “right to the city” is now more widely accepted given today’s current cultural and social situation. Most current research on Henri Lefebvre refers solely to his ideas and their theoretical discussion, without focusing on the empirical transcription of the philosopher. This book fills this gap, and proposes examples about the empirical use of Henri Lefebvre’s sociology from the perspective of different cities and researchers in order to understand the city and its evolutions in the context of neoliberal globalization. The book’s main purpose is to revisit Lefebvre’s still-relevant key concepts to propose new comprehensions of the contemporary city. Case studies in this book will show also that the reception of Lefebvrian concepts differs across different contexts, depending on the social and political circumstances of each country. The debates in this book both expand the scope of urban imagination, and help to reinvigorate, unify, and empower shared desires for just urban outcomes. The contributions to this book also illuminate the everyday choices concerning the form and social processes of the city, and the inspiration that they draw from Lefebvre’s theoretical legacy in the realm of urban sociology.

Author: Kheir Al-Kodmany
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811560293
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
The chaotic proliferation of skyscrapers in many cities around the world is contributing to a decline in placemaking. This book examines the role of skyscrapers and open spaces in promoting placemaking in the city of Chicago. Chicago’s skyscrapers tell an epic story of transformative architectural design, innovative engineering solutions, and bold entrepreneurial spirit. The city’s public plazas and open spaces attract visitors, breathe life, and bring balance into the cityscape. Using locational data from social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with imagery from Google Earth, fieldwork, direct observations, in-depth surveys, and the combined insights from architectural and urban design literature, this study reveals the roles that socio-spatial clusters of skyscrapers, public spaces, architecture, and artwork play to enhance placemaking in Chicago. The study illustrates how Chicago, as the birthplace of skyscrapers, remains a leading city in tall building integration and innovation. Focusing on some of the finest urban places in America, including the Chicago River, the Magnificent Mile, and the Chicago Loop, the book offers meaningful architectural and urban design lessons that are transferable to emerging skyscraper cities around the globe.