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In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim—who is at the forefront of this new movement—has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world—including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bolanger, Julia Czerniak, and more—capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.
"Water and Asphalt, the latest volume in the UFO series, investigates the metropolitan area of Venice with regard to the increasing separation of residential and industrial neighborhoods. It is based on an extensive research project at Venice's Università IUAV on urban density and sprawl. The densely populated metropolitan region around the world-famous 'Sernenissima', crisscrossed by networks of roads and waterways, provides the ideal test case for imagining the concept termed by this study as the Project of Isotropy. The researchers argue that conditions now exist for redevising the isotropic space in Venice with a focus on the water system, roads and public transportation, alternative mobility, forms of diffused welfare, innovative agriculture, and the decentralized production of energy.--Publisher's website.
Two contrasting terms are joined to conjugate the traditional idea of metropolis with horizontality; to combine the center of a vast territory--hierarchically organized, dense, vertical, and produced by polarization--with the idea of a more diffuse, isotropic urban condition, where center and periphery blur. Beyond a simplistic center versus periphery opposition, the concept of a horizontal metropolis reveals the dispersed condition as a potential asset, rather than a limit, to the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension. Around 1990, Terry McGee, an urban researcher at University of British Columbia, coined the term desakota, deriving from Indonesian “desa” (village...
Some time ago, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis used the term "porosity" with reference to Naples’ urban characteristics – spaces merging into each other and providing the backdrop for the unforeseen – improvisation as a way of life. Today, the term "porosity" in this context is increasingly used conceptually. Well-known authors from the worlds of architecture, town planning, and landscape design embark on a search for new concepts for a life-enhancing, user-friendly city – with reference to this enigmatic term. The term refers to the overlaying and interweaving of spaces and structures, to urban textures and their architectural properties and qualities – to cities with radically mixed urban functions.
The Designing Environments book series addresses questions regarding necessary environmental transformation in the context of the fast-unfolding environmental crisis. This is done from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, examining the negative impact of human transformations of the environment and providing different inroads towards sustainable environmental transformation with net positive impact. Volume one of the Designing Environments book series brings together experts from different disciplines and often inter- and transdisciplinary contexts, who discuss specific approaches to overcoming the negative impact of the transformation of environments by humans. Across the 12 chapters of volume one, specific keywords recur that are indicative of shared insights and concerns. These include Anthropocene, climate change, complexity, critical zone, ecosystem services, and sustainability. Furthermore, interdisciplinary approaches to human–environment interactions, sustainability transitions, and socio-ecological systems take center stage and are discussed in relation to conceptual and methodological as well as societal and technological challenges and opportunities.
A critical introduction to the design of public spaces The way public spaces are designed reflects the period in which they were created. However, in our globalized world of experience and images the desire for uniqueness tends to achieve the opposite: increasingly, designers of open spaces resort to the same devices and thereby distance themselves from the urban context. The author analyzes ten outstanding contemporary designs of public spaces in Europe in terms of their function in the urban context and what materials are used for their implementation. In interviews with the designers she retraces the changes of the concepts during the design stage of the projects, underpinning her findings with numerous sketches. In addition, her research focuses on how the projects were received in the community. Learning from designers of outstanding public spaces in Europe Numerous unpublished design sketches A clear guide to urban design Also available in a French edition
This open access book provides an integrated overview of the challenges and resources of large-scale social housing estates in Europe and outlines possible interdisciplinary approaches and tools to promote their regeneration. It especially focuses on the tool of urban living labs, as promising in promoting new and more effective local governance and in including the different actors into the planning process. The book combines theory and practice, since it is the result of action-research conducted in different social housing estates all over Europe. Building on the results of the SoHoLab project (2017–2020), the book benefits from a multidisciplinary perspective, since the researchers involved belong to the fields of anthropology, urban planning, architecture, urban sociology. The project combined theoretical reflections with the installation and/or the consolidation of Urban Living Labs, run by universities, in large social housing estates in three European cities: Brussels, Milan and Paris.
The rural is not what it used to be. No longer simply a site for agricultural production for the city, the relationship between the rural and urban has become much more complex. Established categories such as rural /urban and village/city no longer hold true. Rural and urban conditions have become increasingly blurred, so how can we identify and distinguish their specific characteristics? Where is the rural, and what role does it play in an urbanised world? In developing countries the countryside is a volatile and contradictory landscape: legally designated rural areas look like dense slums; factories intersect fields and farmers no longer farm. In contrast, in developed regions, the rural h...
Der Urban Design Ecologies Reader stellt Architekten und Stadtplanern wichtige Tools zum besseren Verständnis heutiger städtebaulicher Maßnahmen bereit. Essays führender Experten spannen den Bogen zwischen historischen Entwicklungen und innovativen Ansätzen zur Bewältigung der globalen Herausforderungen rasanter Urbanisierungsprozesse und des Klimawandels. Die neuesten Ansätze in den Bereichen Stadtentwicklung, darunter Kernkonzepte wie Stadtarchitektur, Architektur großer Metropolen (Stichwort "Großarchitektur"), Wucherung der Städte, Megastädte (oder die informelle Stadt) und Metastädte, die von digitalen Technologien und dem Ökologiegedanken getragen werden, werden im Detail erörtert.
The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today’s urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world’s population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from...