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Understanding the City

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

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.

Understanding the City

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

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.

Understanding Cities

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

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.

Urban Transformation

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

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.

Urban Code

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

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.

The Image of the City

The Image of the City PDF Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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.

Urban Smellscapes

Urban Smellscapes PDF Author: Victoria Henshaw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135100950
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
We see the city, we hear the city, but above all: we smell the city. Scent has unique qualities: ubiquity, persistence, and an unparalleled connection to memory, yet it has gone overlooked in discussions of sensory design. What scents shape the city? How does scent contribute to placemaking? How do we design smell environments in the city? Urban Smellscapes makes a notable contribution towards the growing body of literature on the senses and design by providing some answers to these questions and contributing towards the wider research agenda regarding how people sensually experience urban environments. It is the first of its kind in examining the role of smell specifically in contemporary experiences and perceptions of English towns and cities, highlighting the perception of urban smellscapes as inter-related with place perception, and describing odour’s contribution towards overall sense of place. With case studies from factories, breweries, urban parks, and experimental smell environments in Manchester and Grasse, Urban Smellscapes identifies processes by which urban smell environments are managed and controlled, and gives designers and city managers tools to actively use smell in their work.

Understanding the Chinese City

Understanding the Chinese City PDF Author: Li Shiqiao
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473905397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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.

Understanding the City

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

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.

Who's Your City?

Who's Your City? PDF Author: Richard Florida
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307372138
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
International Bestseller All places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who’s Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you. It’s a cliché of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But it’s not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on twenty years of innovative research in urban studies, creativity, and demographic trends. In fact, as new units of economic growth called mega-regions become increasingly specialized, the world is becoming more and more “spiky” — divided between flourishing clusters of talent, education and competitiveness, and moribund “valleys.” All these places have personalities, Richard Florida explains in the second half of Who’s Your City?, and happiness depends on finding the city in which you can balance your personal and career goals to thrive. More people than ever before now have the opportunity to choose where to live, but at different points in our lives we need different kinds of places, he points out — what a couple of recent college graduates want from their city isn’t necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighbourhood isn’t likely to be the best fit for patio man. So, for the first time, Who’s Your City? ranks cities by their fitness for various life stages, rating the best places for singles, young families, and empty nesters. It summarizes the key factors that make place matter to different kinds of people, from professional opportunities to the closeness of family to how well it matches their lifestyle, and provides an in-depth series of steps to help you choose the right place wisely. Sparkling with Richard Florida’s signature intellectual originality, Who’s Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, from a startling “Singles Map” of the United States to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to people’s sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, it is both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essential guide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.

Tall Buildings and the City

Tall Buildings and the City PDF Author: Kheir Al-Kodmany
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811560293
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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.