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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Landscape art & architecture > City & town planning - architectural aspects
By focusing on the skyscraping transnational building, this book bridges two key debates on the transformation and emerging problems besetting major cities - globalization and ecological and sustainable building design. While such structures tend to be constructed and/or used by transnational companies and are generally viewed as emblems of a 'global city', they nevertheless impact seriously on their local environment, posing numerous environmental burdens on it. By examining office blocks held by multinational firms in Amsterdam, Sao Paolo and Beijing, the book analyses how transnational buildings might be made sustainable. It compares and contrasts the different social mechanisms that are, or may be, in place and how sustainable building practices that are being activated in certain locations could be adopted elsewhere.
Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. In this original approach to the world of planning theory, Robert A. Beauregard cuts across the many different ways to think about planning by organizing them around four core tasks: knowing, engaging, prescribing, and executing. In doing so, Beauregard explores how a basic concern with the relationship between knowledge and action has evolved into a complex discussion of democracy, inclusion, and justice. Key features include: a cross-national approach to the topic a unique overview of key concepts centred on the profession of urban and regional planning coverage of historical planning theory as well as recent developments in the field an accessible writing style suitable for both those studying urban and regional planning, as well as practicing planners.
Urban parks and gardens are where people go to reconnect with nature and destress. But do they all provide the same benefits or are some better than others? What specific attributes set some green spaces apart? Can we objectively measure their impact on mental health and well-being? If so, how do we use this evidence to guide the design of mentally healthy cities? The Contemplative Landscape Model unveils the path to answer these questions. Rooted in landscape architecture and neuroscience, this innovative concept is described for the first time in an extended format, offering a deep dive into contemplative design and the science behind it. In the face of the global mental health crisis, and increasing disconnection from nature, design strategies for creating healthier urban environments are what our cities so sorely need. The book delves into the neuroscience behind contemplative landscapes, their key spatial characteristics, and practical application of the Contemplative Landscape Model through case studies from around the world. Landscape architects, urban planners, students, land managers, and anyone interested in unlocking the healing power of landscapes will find inspiration here.
This book describes how consumer demands are changing, strategies for overcoming NIMBYism, and the latest trends related to open space, infill and mixed housing development, increasing density, transportation, and street design.
Set within a wider British and international context of post-war reconstruction, The Everyday Experiences of Reconstruction and Regeneration focuses on such debates and experiences in Birmingham and Coventry as they recovered from Second World War bombings and post-war industrial collapse. Including numerous images, Adams and Larkham explore the initial development of the post-Second World War reconstruction projects, which so substantially changed the face of the cities and provided radical new identities. Exploring these cities throughout the post-war period brings into sharp focus the duality of contemporary approaches to regeneration, which often criticise mid-twentieth century 'poorly-conceived' planning and architectural projects for producing inhuman and unsympathetic schemes, while proposing exactly the type of large-scale regeneration that may potentially create similar issues in the future. This book would be beneficial for academics and students of planning and urban design, particularly those with an interest in post-catastrophe or large-scale reconstruction projects within cities.
Windows Upon Planning History delves into a wide range of perspectives on urbanism from Europe, Australia and the USA to investigate the effects of changing perceptions and different ways of seeing cities and urban regions. Fischer, Altrock and a team of 13 distinguished authors examine how and why the ideologies and the processes of city making changed in modern and post-modern times. Illustrated with over 45 images, the themes addressed in the book range from the changing outlook on Berlin's historic apartment districts and their demolition, salvation and gentrification to how planning was deployed to support dictatorship; from the shattering of myths like democracies totally departing from preceding dictatorships to the model of the post-war modern city and its fate towards the end of the twentieth century. The volume combines case studies of cities on three continents with reflections on the historiography and the state of planning history. With a foreword by Stephen V. Ward, this book will appeal to a wide readership interested in the histories of planning, architecture and cities.
During recent years, the topic of participation has increasingly been gaining importance in Iran - in the scientific field, in practice and rhetoric. However, in current scientific literature - and especially in English literature - there is little knowledge on the conditions, legal background, perceptions, experiences and processes of citizens' participation in Iran. This book aims to shed light on the paradoxical question of participation in Iran: it is old and new, dysfunctioning and functioning, disappointing and promising. This slippery status of participation convinces scholars to suggest contradictory interpretations and understandings about the existence, functionality, and potentiality of this concept. The book therefore shows the different perspectives, interpretations, historical developments and case studies of participation in Iran, thus giving the reader a kaleidoscope view on the question of participation in Iran.
This book proposes a new critical relationship between computation and architecture, developing a history and theory of representation in architecture to understand and unleash potential means to open up creativity in the field. Historically, architecture has led spatial representation. Today, computation has established new representational paradigms that can be compared to spatial representations, such as the revolution of perspective in the Renaissance. Architects now use software, robotics, and fabrication tools with very little understanding and participation in how these tools influence, revolutionize, and determine both architecture and its construction today. Why does the discipline of architecture not have a higher degree of authorship in the conception and development of computational technologies that define spatial representation? This book critically explores the relationship between history, theory and cultural criticism. Lorenzo-Eiroa positions new understandings through parallel historical sections and theories of many revolutionary representational architecture canons displaced by conventional spatial projection. He identifies the architects, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers that were able to revolutionise their disciplines through the development of new technologies, new systems of representation, and new lenses to understand reality. This book frames the discussion by addressing new means to understand and expand architecture authorship in relation to survey, information, representation, higher dimensional space, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence - in the pursuit of activating an architecture of information. This will be important reading for upper-level students and researchers of architecture and architectural theory, especially those with a keen interest in computational design and robotic fabrication.
The book has an attractive blend of urban planning and policy insights, colorful historic background, intriguing consideration of technological trends, and essential technical background (written for the educated layperson). It has extensive illustrations and case studies. It would be accessible and interesting to those without the engineering expertise required for most similar books on the topic. It addresses safety, personal security, aesthetics, economics, environmental impacts, and sense of place, generally from a policy and planning perspective.
This book is a comparative analysis of the architecture of central public spaces of capital cities in Central and Eastern Europe during the period of their authoritarian and post-authoritarian development. It demonstrates that national identity transformations cause structural changes in urban public spaces, and theorises identity and national identity within urban planning in order to explain the influence of historical, cultural, mental, social as well as ideological and political conditions on the processes of shaping and perceiving the architecture of public space. The book addresses the process of shaping and restructuring historic centres of European capital cities of Kiev, Moscow, Berlin, and Warsaw, which developed under authoritarian regime conditions throughout the 20th century and were characterised by ideological determinism and the influence of state ideology and politics on the architecture of public spaces. The book will be useful for urban planners, architects, land management specialists, art historians, political scientists, and readers interested in the theory and history of cities, the fundamentals of urban planning and architecture, and the planning of cities and public spaces.
Shopping malls in China create a new pseudo-public urban space which is under the control of private or quasi-public power structure. As they are open for public use, mediated by the co-mingling of private property rights and public meanings of urban space, the rise, publicness and consequences of the boom in the construction of shopping malls raises major questions in spatial political economy and magnifies existing theoretical debates between the natural and conventional schools of property rights. In examining these issues this book develops a theoretical framework starting with a critique of the socio-spatial debate between two influential bodies of work represented by the work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. Drawing on the framework, the book examines why pseudo-public spaces have been growing so rapidly in China since the 1980s; assesses to what degree pseudo-public spaces are public, and how they affect the publicness of Chinese cities; and explores the consequences of their rise. Findings of this book provide insights that can help to better understand Chinese urbanism and also have the potential to inform urban policy in China. This book will be of interest to academics and researchers in both Chinese studies and urban studies.
This book tackles the emerging smart urbanism to advance a new way of urban thinking and to explore a new design approach. It unravels several urban transformations in dualities: economic relationality and centrality, technological flattening and polarisation, and spatial division and fusion. These dualities are interdependent; concurrent, coexisting, and contradictory, they are jointly disrupting and reshaping many aspects of contemporary cities and spaces. The book draws on a suite of international studies, experiences, and observations, including case studies in Beijing, Singapore, and Boston, to reveal how these processes are impacting urban design, development, and policy approaches. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many changes already in motion, and provides an extreme circumstance for reflecting on and imagining urban spaces. These analyses, thoughts, and visions inform an urban imaginary of smart design that incorporates change, flexibility, collaboration, and experimentation, which together forge a paradigm of urban thinking. This paradigm builds upon the modernist and postmodernist urban design traditions and extends them in new directions, responding to and anticipating a changing urban environment. The book proposes a smart design manifesto to stimulate thought, trigger debate, and, hopefully, influence a new generation of urban thinkers and smart designers. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of urban design, planning, architecture, urban development, and urban studies.
Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become 'a great commercial emporium and fulcrum'. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall's words, 'perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world'. The story of Singapore's remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known. In Planning Singapore: The Experimental City, Stephen Hamnett and Belinda Yuen have brought together a set of chapters on Singapore's planning achievements, aspirations and challenges, which are united in their focus on what might happen next in the planning of the island-state. Chapters range over Singapore's planning system, innovation and future economy, housing, biodiversity, water and waste, climate change, transport, and the potential transferability of Singapore's planning knowledge. A key question is whether the planning approaches, which have served Singapore so well until now, will suffice to meet the emerging challenges of a changing global economy, demographic shifts, new technologies and the existential threat of climate change. Singapore as a global city is becoming more unequal and more diverse. This has the potential to weaken the social compact which has largely existed since independence and to undermine the social resilience undoubtedly needed to cope with the shocks and disruptions of the twenty-first century. The book concludes, however, that Singapore is better-placed than most to respond to the challenges which it will certainly face thanks to its outstanding systems of planning and implementation, a proven capacity to experiment and a highly developed ability to adapt quickly, purposefully and pragmatically to changing circumstances.
Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks downtown from his Greenwich Village apartment through Washington Square to his Tribeca office. Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he never ignores his surroundings. Instead, he pays careful, close attention. And in "Twenty""Minutes in Manhattan," he explains what he sees, what he imagines, what he knows--giving us extraordinary access to the layers of history, the feats of engineering and artistry, and the intense social drama that take place along a simple twenty-minute walk.
Exploring Food and Urbanism looks at the ways food and cities interconnect in a diversity of places across the globe. The book's focus moves from transformations in feeding the city and its hinterland in Istanbul, Turkey, through neighbourhoods struggling with food access in Blantyre, Malawi, to the challenges in making convivial public food spaces in Cairo. It explores everyday buying practices in Islamabad food markets that reflect wider changes in food cultures in Pakistan. The possibilities for growing food in suburban Cape Town in South Africa are tested, while possibilities for sharing meals using online methods to bring cooks and eaters together are considered across the Netherlands. This edited volume makes clear that globally food is critical to sustainable urbanism everywhere across cities from kitchens to gardens, food markets, food shops, streets, squares, neighbourhoods, cities, suburbs, and hinterlands. It shows how food cultures, practices, and economics are closely intertwined with how places are planned and designed even if this is not always fully recognised. The editors of the book conclude that food can and should contribute to responding to the challenges presented by the worsening climate emergency through a focus on sustainable urbanism. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urbanism.
Provides an index of ideas, theories, projects, and definitions that string into a methodology for evaluating the contemporary language of architecture. Beautifully designed with text and image spreads, it includes over 160 full colour illustrations. Includes interviews and contributions from Toyo Ito, Anthony Vidler, Ben van Berkel, Sou Fujimoto, Christian Kerez and Greg Lynn.
The Spatialities of Radio Astronomy examines the multidisciplinary overlap between the spatial disciplines and the studies of science and technology through a comparative study of four of the world’s most important radio telescopes. Employing detailed analysis, historical research, interviews, personal observations, and various conceptual manoeuvres, Guy Trangoš reveals the depth of spatial process active at these scientific sites and the territories they traverse. Through the conceptual frameworks of territory, hyper-concentration, and contingency, Trangoš interprets the telescope as exploded across space and time, present in multiple connected sites simultaneously, and active in the production of space. He develops a historiographic and contemporary analysis of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, Chile); the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST, China); the Arecibo Observatory (Puerto Rico); and the MeerKAT/SKA (South Africa). These case studies are global exemplars of the different spatial transformations that occur through science. Their relationships to surrounding communities and landscapes reveal deeper constitutional processes embodied in each institutional and spatial form. This book spans the modern history of architecture and science, the studies of science, technology and society, and urban theory. It is of specific interest to architects and designers expanding their analysis of spatial production, scholars in the study of geography, landscape, science, technology, and astronomy, and people fascinated with how these radio telescopes were conceptualised, built, and operate today.
The Futureproof City creates adaptability and resiliency in the face of the unknown challenges resulting from technological change, population explosion, global pandemic, and environmental crisis. A paradigm shift is urgently required in the means of conceiving, delivering, and managing city development to create better places to live. This book brings to the fore many new solutions currently being proposed and piloted globally, identifying ten key areas affecting the physical fabric of our cities where governments, planners, investors, and the individuals responsible for shaping lives can refocus their understanding, priorities, and funding in order to more effectively utilise the limited financial, natural, and time resources available. It will be key reading for every policy maker and professional working in sustainability, development, technology, health and welfare, investment, and risk issues in cities today.
Many `model' cities, both imagined and physical, have existed throughout history; from the ideal cities of the Renaissance, Urbino, Pienza and Ferrara, to modernist utopias, such as Brasilia or Chandigarh. North Korea's Pyongyang, however, is arguably unique. Entirely rebuilt following the Korean War (1950-53), the city was planned and fully implemented to model a single ideological vision - a guide for an entire state. As a result, the urban fabric of Pyongyang displays an extraordinary architectural cohesion and narrative, artfully captured in the pages of this book. In recent years, many of Pyongyang's buildings have been redeveloped to remove interior features or to render facades unrecognizable. From the city's monumental axes to its symbolic sports halls and experimental housing concepts, this timely book offers comprehensive visual access to Pyongyang's restricted buildings, which still preserve the DPRK's original vision for a city designed `for the people'. Often kitsch, colourful and dramatic, Pyongyang's architecture can be reminiscent of the aesthetic of a Wes Anderson film, where it is difficult to distinguish between reality and theatre. Reflecting a culture that has carefully crafted its own narrative, the backdrop of each photograph has been replaced with a colour gradient, evoking the idealized pastel skies of the country's propaganda posters.
Merging together the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and urban environmental education, Urban Ecosystem Justice promotes building fair, accessible, and mutually beneficial relationships between citizens and the soils, water, atmospheres, and biodiversity in their cities. This book provides a framework for re-centering issues of justice and fairness in sustainability discourse while challenging the profound ecological alienation experienced by urban residents. While the urban sustainability movement has had many successes in the past few decades, there remain areas for it to grow. For one, the benefits of sustainability have disproportionately benefited wealthier city residents, with concerns over equity, justice, and social sustainability frequently taking a back seat to economic and environmental considerations. Additionally, many city dwellers remain estranged from and unfamiliar with ecological processes, with urban environments often thought of as existing outside of nature or as hopelessly degraded. Through a citizen-centered lens, the book offers a guide to reconciling these issues by demonstrating how questions of equity, access, and justice apply to the biophysical dimensions of the urban ecosystem: soil, water, air, waste, and biodiversity. Drawing heavily from the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and ecological design, this book lays out a science of cities for people: a pedagogical platform that can be used to promote ecological literacy in underrepresented urban communities through affordable and decentralized means. This book provides both a theoretical and practical field guide to students and researchers of urban sustainability, city planners, architects, policymakers, and activists wishing to develop reciprocal relationships with urban ecologies.
1. Emerging Public Space in\of the Pearl River Delta employs the applied work of twenty, international scholars and practitioners to discover new and emerging models of urban public space as it is emerging as both a condition and product of contemporary urbanization in the Pearl River Delta in China; 2. The proposed book deals specifically with urban public space whereas the vast majority of existing books on the contemporary Chinese urban condition subsume this topic into the general theme of urbanization or urban development 3. The proposed book focuses on the Pearl River Delta, which is acknowledged as an exceptional urban phenomenon in China and in the world, but for which an individualized scholarly treatment of public space is lacking 4. Unlike the existing literature on the Pearl River Delta, the proposed book is taking an explicitly design-centered perspective, making for a unique set of approaches and insights, grounded in scholarly rigor and juxtaposed with pieces from sociological angles.
- The book tackles five cutting-edge topics in the field of urban studies: the anti-progress movement, resilient urban model, localism, the urban commons, and the bottom-up urbanism. - The use of an attractive cultural narrative, the eco-lifestyle, to analyse and interpret architectural and urban spaces. - The use of the ecological crisis as starting point and backbone of that narrative. This topic is a mainstream concern in contemporary society.
Around the world, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are working to ensure cities and communities are prepared for the challenges and opportunities of aged and highly urbanised populations. Bringing together stakeholders from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, this book presents new evidence and critical reviews of current knowledge to promote ongoing discussions on: affordable and accessible housing to support ageing in place; built environment supports for health-enhancing physical activity and mobility; and planning and design strategies and approaches to promote healthy and active ageing in cities and communities. The book content is framed by socio-ecological models of ageing and well-being that emphasise the dynamic interconnections between people and environment. Contributions in this edited volume stem from the International Ageing Urbanism Colloquium, 2017, Singapore University of Technology and Design. |
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