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Books : Nonfiction : Urban Planning & Development : New Towns
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Rome was Mussolini's obsession. After coming to power as a result of his famed march on the city in 1922, he promised Italians that his fascist revolution would unite them as never before and make Italy a major power on the world stage. In the next two decades, he set about rebuilding Rome as the foremost site and symbol of the new fascist order. Through an ambitious program of demolition and construction, he sought to make Rome a capital that both embraced modernity while preserving and glorifing the city's ancient past. Building the new Rome put people to work, "liberated" ancient monuments from cluttered surroundings, cleared slums; produced giant complexes for education, sports, and cinema; produced wide new boulevards and piazzas; and provided the regime with a showcase for the supposed grandeur, dynamism, and power of fascism. This intriguing book reveals Mussolini's tremendous and lasting impact on the city to which millions flock each year.
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Cities and Urban Life, authored by two of the best-known textbook writers in the field, provides a comprehensive introduction to urban sociology, urban anthropology, and urban studies courses. Primarily sociological in approach, this book incorporates historical, social psychological, geographical, and anthropological insights. While strong in the classical urban sociology, it also gives extensive attention to the "new" political economy approach to urban studies. Also, the authors use global cities as case studies for more relevance to students.
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Seaside, Florida, is a town designed as an "ideal" community, where houses have front porches and verandas, picket fences, sleeping porches, where streets are carved and paved with brick, and sidewalks are made of pebbles and seashells. This resort town on Florida’s panhandle coast has had an extraordinary impact on the thinking of architects, developers, planners, traffic engineers, sociologists, environmentalists, and even political thinkers. As the first, the most widely published, and now at twenty-five by far the most esteemed and well-known example of the revival of traditional neighborhood design, Seaside has become the icon of the New Urbanism movement, and has been emulated extensively.
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Transit-oriented development (TOD) seeks to maximize access to mass transit and nonmotorized transportation with centrally located rail or bus stations surrounded by relatively high-density commercial and residential development. New Urbanists and smart growth proponents have embraced the concept and interest in TOD is growing, both in the United States and around the world.
New Transit Town brings together leading experts in planning, transportation, and sustainable design -- including Scott Bernstein, Peter Calthorpe, Jim Daisa, Sharon Feigon, Ellen Greenberg, David Hoyt, Dennis Leach, and Shelley Poticha -- to examine the first generation of TOD projects and derive lessons for the next generation. It offers topic chapters that provide detailed discussion of key issues along with case studies that present an in-depth look at specific projects. Topics examined include:
- the history of projects and the appeal of this form of development
- a taxonomy of TOD projects appropriate for different contexts and scales
- the planning, policy and regulatory framework of "successful" projects
- obstacles to financing and strategies for overcoming those obstacles
- issues surrounding traffic and parking
- the roles of all the actors involved and the resources available to them
- performance measures that can be used to evaluate outcomes
Case Studies include A
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America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.
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The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.
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A visual narrative of this groundbreaking New Urbanism development in the Florida Panhandle. Designed by planning pioneers Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Rosemary Beach is a decidedly different community. Renowned photographer Richard Sexton became an advocate of Rosemary Beach, finding it a positive example of how future communities can become better and more stimulating places. His admiration is palpable throughout this thoroughly descriptive and artful photo essay, which features a vicarious stroll through residential and civic buildings and public spaces, and details the prescribed house types that define the community. A secondary photo essay focuses on an intimate view of how residents live in Rosemary Beach. The final section provides a walking tour experience.
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This project has been generously supported by Capital Partners.After the devastating earthquake in Haiti, on January 12, 2010, Steven Holl had the idea of devoting the next Pamphlet Architecture book to solutions for rebuilding the architecture and infrastructure of the country. Going back to the origins of the series, which was founded by Holl in 1977, Pamphlet Architecture 31: New Haiti Villages presents Steven Holl Architects' vision for a new way of building in Haiti, with contributions from leading structural engineer Guy Nordenson and Matthias Schuler of climate engineering firm Transsolar.
To avoid making architecture that would just repeat the problems of the past, Holl asked the following questions to guide his design:
1. How should Haiti rebuild?
2. If the political corruption before the earthquake was problematic, what now?
3. Can urban/architectural expression be by Haitians?
4. Will outside engineers build pragmatic strongboxes?
5. Can the poetry of Haitis wind and sea, its colors and vegetation, its sky, guide planners and architects?Holl attempts to answer these questions with his idea for "Dense-Pack Villages," a type of courtyard housing that could be built with recycled concrete from fallen buildings and steel and would be hurricane- and earthquake-resistant. Each "village" could house approximately 200 occupants, and the co
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In Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream, Nicholas Dagen Bloom examines the "new town" movement of the 1960s, which sought to transform the physical and social environments of American suburbs by showing that idealism could be profitable.Bloom offers case studies of three of the movement's more famous examples—Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; and Irvine, California—to flesh out his historical account. In each case, innovative planners mixed land uses and housing types; refined architectural, graphic, and landscape design; offered well-defined village and town centers; and pioneered institutional planning. As Bloom demonstrates, these efforts did not uniformly succeed, and attempts to reshape community life through design notably faltered. However, despite frequent disappointments and compromises, the residents have kept the new town ideals alive for over four decades and produced a vital form of suburban community that is far more complicated and interesting than the early vision promoted by the town planners. Lively chapters illustrate efforts in local politics, civic spirit, social and racial integration, feminist innovations, and cultural sponsorship.
Suburban Alchemy should be of interest to scholars of U.S. urban history, planning history, and community development, as well as the general reader interested in the development of alternative communities in the United States.
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Recent publications on urbanism and the rural environment in Late Antiquity, most of which explore a single region or narrow chronological niche, have emphasized either textual or archeological evidence. None has attempted the more ambitious task of bringing together the full range of such evidence within a multiregional perspective and around common themes. Urban Centers and Rural Contexts seeks to redress this omission.
While ancient literature and the physical remains of cities attest to the power that urban values held over the lives of their inhabitants, the rural areas in which the majority of imperial citizens lived have not been well served by the historical record. Only recently have archeological excavations and integrated field surveys sufficiently enhanced our knowledge of the rural contexts to demonstrate the continuing interdependence of urban centers and rural communities in Late Antiquity. These new data call into question the conventional view that this interdependence progressively declined as a result of governmental crises, invasions, economic dislocation, and the success of Christianization.
The essays in this volume require us to abandon the search for a single model of urban and rural change; to reevaluate the cities and towns of the Empire as centers of habitation, rather than archeological museums; and to reconsider the evidence of continuous and pervasive cultural change across the countryside. Deploying a wide range of material as well as literary evidence, the authors provide access not only into the world of élites, but also to the scarcely known lives of those without a voice in the literature, those men and women who worked in the shops, labored in the fields, and humbled themselves before their gods. They bring us closer to the complexity of life in late ancient communities and, in consequence, closer to both urban and rural citizens.
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In this thoroughly revised edition of Managing Growth in America's Communities, readers will learn the principles that guide intelligent planning for communities of any size, grasp the major issues in successfully managing growth, and discover what has actually worked in practice (and where and why). This clearly written book details how American communities have grappled with the challenges of planning for growth and the ways in which they are adapting new ideas about urban design, green building, and conservation. It describes the policies and programs they have implemented, and includes examples from towns and cities throughout the U.S.
Growth management” is essential today, as communities seek to control the location, impact, character and timing of development in order to balance environmental and economic needs and concerns. Managing Growth in America's Communities addresses all of the key considerations:
The author, who is one of the nation’s leading authorities on managing community growth, provides examples from dozens of communities across the country, as well as state and regional approaches. Brief profiles present overviews of specific problems addressed, techniques utilized, results achieved, and contact information for further research. Informative sidebars offer additional perspectives from experts in growth management, including Robert Lang, Arthur C. Nelson, Erik Meyers, and others.
This new edition has been completely updated by the author. In particular, he considers issues of population growth, eminent domain, and the importance of design, especially green” design. He also reports on the latest ideas in sustainable development, smart growth,” neighborhood design, transit-oriented development, and green infrastructure planning. Like its predecessor, the second edition of Managing Growth in America's Communities is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how communities can grow intelligently.
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Story and Sustainability explores the role of story in planning theory and practice, with the goal of creating U.S. cities able to balance competing claims for economic growth, environmental health, and social justice. In the book, urban practitioners and scholars from fields as diverse as American studies, English, geography, history, planning, and criminal justice reflect critically on the traditional exclusionary power of storytelling and on its potential to facilitate the transformations of imagination, theory, and practice necessary to create sustainable, democratic American cities.The book begins with an editors' introduction identifying story, sustainable U.S. cities, and democracy as the three key themes. Part I advances and refines these concepts, connects them to contemporary U.S. urban planning, and provides tools that can be used when reading and interpreting the texts in part II. Part II exemplifies, amplifies, and modifies the key themes and arguments through the presentation of eight texts: theoretical and experiential, academic and nonacademic, expository and narrative, and familiar and unfamiliar. The combined focus on story and urban sustainabilit
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Often synonymous with Kansas City is the beautiful and enchanting Country Club Plaza. This upscale midtown shopping center and surrounding suburban community-which remain the places to shop and live nearly sixty years after their construction-are a testament to the creative genius of J.C. Nichols. Now available in paper, J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City chronicles the success of the man who forever changed the shape of Kansas City and has influenced urban development throughout the United States.
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Many European towns have experienced loss of population, degradation of physical structure and profound economic change at least once since the height of the Roman Empire. This text examines the various causes of these changes, their results and the reasons why some centres survived and flourished while others failed and died. The contributors bring to bear the techniques of history and archaeology, the perspectives of economics, agronomy, medicine, architecture and planning, georgraphy and law to the study. The result is a synthesis which connects the decline of the Roman Empire to the effects of the Black Death and the economic transformation of Renaissance Florence.
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Attention to public spaces has become a worldwide phenomenon—from Chicago’s high-budget Millennium Park to Rotterdam’s Westblaak Skatepark to Japan’s Roppongi seating project. And this resurgence of interest has led to new relationships between artists, architects, designers, and local authorities. Behold some of the most innovative, interesting, and diverse examples, in this first book dedicated to the subject. There are squares and plazas, streetscapes and promenades, gardens and parks, and more—including a temporary Parisian beachside near the Seine, an English bus stop that actually sings to the people waiting, and a wasteland transformed into a “Mountain of Hope” in Soweto, South Africa. Many of the projects challenge accepted notions of how communal spaces should function and look, and taken together they provide an illuminating global overview.
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The Scottish urbanist and biologist Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of "region" to architecture and planning. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was one of the strongest advocates of town planning and an active participant in debates about the future of the city. He was arguably the first planner to recognize the importance of historic city centers, and his renewal work in Edinburgh�s Old Town is visible and impressive to this day.Geddes's famous analytical triad--place, work, and folk, corresponding to the geographical, historical, and spiritual aspects of the city--provides the basic structure of this examination of his urban theory. Volker Welter examines Geddes�s ideas in the light of nineteenth-century biology--in which Geddes received his academic training�-showing Geddes�s use of biological concepts to be far more sophisticated than popular images of the city as an organic entity. His urbanism was informed by his lifelong interest in the theory of evolution and in ecology, cutting-edge areas in the late nineteenth century. Balancing Geddes�s biological thought is his interest in the historical Greek concept of polis, usually translated as city-state but implying a view of the city as a cultural and spiritual phenomenon.Although Geddes�s work was far-ranging, the city provided the unifying focus of nearly all of his theoretical and practical work. Throughout the book, Welter relates Geddes�s theory of the city to contemporary European debates about architecture and urbanism.
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Managing Growth in America's Communities examines regulatory, and programmatic techniques that have been most useful, obstacles to be overcome, and specific strategies that have been instrumental in achieving successful growth management programs. Examples are provided from dozens of communities across the country as well as state and regional approaches currently in use. Brief profiles present overviews of problems addressed, techniques implemented, outcomes, and contact information for conducting further research. Also included in the volume are informational sidebars written by leading experts in growth management. Managing Growth in America's Communities is essential reading for community development specialists, including government officials, planners, environmentalists, designers, developers, business people, and concerned citizens seeking innovative and feasible ways to manage growth.
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The Village Homes neighborhood in Davis, California is one of the few long-standing examples of sustainable community design. Mark Francis has been studying Village Homes for more than two decades and brings together existing research and writing on the community, studies about the children of Village Homes he conducted throughout the 1980s, and interviews with many parties involved with the project including designers, residents, gardeners, and maintenance people. Mark Francis takes a critical look at Village Homes, addressing its failures as well as its successes, and examines the question of why, despite its success, this development has not been replicated.