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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.
Fascinating discussion on the nature of 'identity' in architecture and urban design.
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...
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.
Essential reading for architects, planners, and anyone else involved in urban design.
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.
This book is about the relation between scientific research and professional practice on the built environment. The physical form of cities is structured in different elements of urban form. Each of these elements, and the way they are combined into distinct patterns, is shaped by various agents and processes of change. Planning, urban design and architecture are practice-oriented activities that have a significant impact on these elements. Yet, this ‘action’ on the physical form if cities tends to be separated from scientific ‘knowledge’ on this complex object. In fact, none of these activities is strongly related to urban morphology, the science of urban form. There are many reason...
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...
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 ...
This book examines the design policies in current development plans. With design quality of growing importance to the public, consumers, developers and their clients, and high on the Secretary of State's agenda, this book makes an important practical contribution to improving design control. With the increasing importance attached to district-wide development plan policies since 1991, local planning authorities and community groups have an important opportunity to improve their control over the built environment. This research text explains how clear, comprehensive and effective policies can be researched, written and implemented.