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Making Better Places
Making Better Places: Urban Design Now discusses how to make better places: how monotonous or rich urban development can be, how appropriate to traffic requirements urban improvements are, or how sustainable an urban design approach can be to existing and future urban dispersal. The book reviews the gap existing between the various environmental disciplines leading to the emergence of urban design; as well as the gap between the rhetoric and practical achievements of urban design. The practice of urban design entails the premise that environments are to be created and transformed to provide the most opportunities for the largest number of people. By using an urban tissue plan, the urban deve...
A Military History of Ireland
This is a major, collaborative study of organised military activity and its broad impact on Ireland over the last thousand years or so, from the middle of the first millennium AD to modern times. It integrates the best recent scholarship in military history into its social and political context to provide a comprehensive treatment of the Irish military experience. The eighteen chronologically-organised chapters are written by leading scholars each of whom is an authority on the period in question. Drawing the whole work together is a wide-ranging introductory essay on the 'Irish military tradition' which explores the relationship of Irish society and politics with militarism and military affairs. The text is illustrated throughout by over 120 pictures and maps.
Responsive Environments
The authors first examine what is meant by the concept of a "responsive environment", and then provide an illustrated step-by-step guide on how to achieve it in real-life design. The book demonstrates the specific characteristics that make for comprehensible and controllable places.
Functionalism Revisited
A range of current approaches to architecture are neglected in our contemporary writings on design philosophies. This book argues that the model of 'function' and the concept of a 'functional building' that we have inherited from the twentieth-century Modernists is limited in scope and detracts from a full understanding of the purposes served by the built environment. It simply does not cover the range of functions that buildings can afford nor is it tied in a conceptually clear manner to our contemporary concepts of architectural theory. Based on Abraham Maslow's theory of human motivations, and following on from Lang's widely-used text, Creating Architectural Theory: The Role of the Behavioral Sciences in Environmental Design, Lang and Moleski here propose a new model of functionalism that responds to numerous observations on the inadequacy of current ways of thinking about functionalism in architecture and urban design. Copiously illustrated, the book puts forward this model and then goes on to discuss in detail each function of buildings and urban environments.
A Beginner's Guide to Urban Design and Development
This book provides invaluable guidance to all those with an interest in placemaking and the built environment, from those with no experience to those who have worked for many years in industry, illustrating key principles that will secure higher quality, more sustainable design in accessible, jargon-free language. The author explains the design process in a straightforward way, exploring the different roles and highlighting the opportunities and limitations different agencies have to influence design over the various stages of the process. Examples from the UK and worldwide look at how the system operates and how best practice can make a real difference on the ground. Case studies examine si...
Urban Transformations
Cities affect every person's life, yet across the traditional divides of class, age, gender and political affiliation, armies of people are united in their dislike of the transformations that cities have undergone in recent times. The physical form of the urban environment is not a designer add-on to 'real' social issues; it is a central aspect of the social world. Yet in many people's experience, the cumulative impacts of recent urban development have created widely un-loved urban places. To work towards better-loved urban environments, we need to understand how current problems have arisen and identify practical action to address them. Urban Transformations examines the crucial issues relating to how cities are formed, how people use these urban environments and how cities can be transformed into better places. Exploring the links between the concrete physicality of the built environment and the complex social, economic, political and cultural processes through which the physical urban form is produced and consumed, Ian Bentley proposes a framework of ideas to provoke and develop current debate and new forms of practice.
The Urban Design Reader
The second edition of The Urban Design Reader draws together the very best of classic and contemporary writings to illuminate and expand the theory and practice of urban design. Nearly 50 generous selections include seminal contributions from Howard, Le Corbusier, Lynch, and Jacobs to more recent writings by Waldheim, Koolhaas, and Sorkin. Following the widespread success of the first edition of The Urban Design Reader, this updated edition continues to provide the most important historical material of the urban design field, but also introduces new topics and selections that address the myriad challenges facing designers today. The six part structure of the second edition guides the reader ...
Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia
This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.
The Natural City
Urban and natural environments are often viewed as entirely separate entities human settlements as the domain of architects and planners, and natural areas as untouched wilderness. This dichotomy continues to drive decision-making in subtle ways, but with the mounting pressures of global climate change and declining biodiversity, it is no longer viable. New technologies are promising to provide renewable energy sources and greener designs, but real change will require a deeper shift in values, attitudes, and perceptions. A timely and important collection, The Natural City explores how to integrate the natural environment into healthy urban centres from philosophical, religious, socio-political, and planning perspectives. Recognizing the need to better link the humanities with public policy, The Natural City offers unique insights for the development of an alternative vision of urban life.
