Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order looks at the well-known and studied landscape architect, Ian McHarg, in a new light. The author explores McHarg's formative years, and investigates how his ideas developed in both their complexity and scale. As a precursor to McHarg's approach in his influential book Design with Nature, this book offers new interpretations into his search for environmental order and outlines how his struggle to understand humanity's relationship to the environment in an era of rapid social and technological change reflects an ongoing challenge that landscape design has yet to fully resolve. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in landscape architectural history.

This book provides the tools to maintain and rebuild the interaction between architecture and public space. Despite the best intentions of designers and planners, interactive frontages have dwindled over the past century in Europe and North America. This book demonstrates why even our best intentions for interactive frontages are currently unable to turn a swelling tide of economic and technological evolution, land consolidation, introversion, stratification, and contagious decline. It uses these lessons to offer concrete locational, programming, design, and management strategies to maximize street-level interaction and trust between street-level architecture, its inhabitants, and the city. This book demonstrates that designers, developers, planners, and managers ultimately have to create the right preconditions for inhabitants and passersby to bring frontages to life. These preconditions connect architecture to its urban, social, economical, and technological context. Only the right frontage in the right context, with the right design, the right inhabitation, and the right attitude to the city will become part of the ecosystem of trust and interaction that supports public life. This book empowers the many participants in this ecosystem to build, inhabit, and enjoy truly urbane architecture.

Urban planning, regeneration and design is an essentially cultural practice with the outcomes often depending upon an understanding of and engagement with the past. As cities in China strive to be competitive and attractive on the world stage, their decaying historical urban fabrics are being transformed into vibrant places through historical-cultural led urban regeneration, however, the impact of their rapid development has escaped serious scrutiny. Heritage-led Urban Regeneration in China presents the detailed evolution of three well-known historic streets in China: the Southern Song Imperial Street in Hangzhou; the residential Pingjiang Street in Suzhou; and the commercial Tunxi Old Street in Huangshan. From their original formation to their more recent regeneration, this book offers a critical evaluation of historical-cultural led urban regeneration projects in China and provides theoretical guidelines for contemporary practice in relation to its tangible and intangible urban heritage. Using interdisciplinary research in architecture, urban design, history and cultural studies, Jing Xie and Tim Heath provide a detailed analysis of the conservation and regeneration efforts of China as an emerging and pivotal world power. An invaluable resource for urban designers, urban planners and architects interested in and working in China, Heritage-led Urban Regeneration in China helps its readers to engage with the essential and invisible factors that produce these revitalised places while forming a critical view towards these projects.

The Routledge Handbook of Institutions and Planning in Action contains a selection of 25 chapters prepared by specialized international scholars of urban planning and urban studies focusing on the question of how institutional innovation occurs in practices of action. The contributors share expertise on institutional innovation and philosophical pragmatism. They discuss the different facets of these two conceptual frameworks and explore the alternative combinations through which they can be approached. The relevance of these conceptual lines of thought will be exemplified in exploring the contemporary practices of sustainable (climate-proof) urban transition. The aim of the handbook is to give a boost to the turn of institutional analysis in the context of action in changing cities. Both philosophical pragmatism and institutional innovation rest on wide international uses in social sciences and planning studies, and may be considered as complementary for many reasons. However, the combination of these different approaches is all but evident and creates a number of dilemmas. After an encompassing introductory section entitled Institutions in Action, the handbook is further divided into the following sections: Institutional innovation Pragmatism: The Dimension of Action On Justification Cultural and Political Institutions in Action Institutions and Urban Transition

Cognition and the Built Environment argues that interacting with our built environment, as users and as architects, is a cognitive process. It claims that architecture, in its form and meaning, is a basic, embodied level of human cognition. The assumption is that we and our built environment together form an intelligent system, a cognitive feedback loop between us and the world of which we are part. With this as a vantage point, the book discusses the meaning and intelligence of concrete architectural environments as well as the agency of the architect, of his client and of the user. The inquiry oscillates between abstract thought, topological models and cognitive semiotics, between pragmatist philosophy and the professional practice of planning cities, developing projects and using objects. Architecture serves more complex purposes than our caves, paths and landmarks did. Written for students and academics of urban design, urban planning and architectural theory, Cognition and the Built Environment argues that human cognition feeds on the interaction between thought, agency and built environment, and that architecture is the spatial form of this interaction.

Envisioning Networked Urban Mobilities brings together scientific reflections on the relations of art and urban mobilities and artistic research on the topic. The editors open the book by setting out the concept grounded in the exhibition curated by Aslak Aamot Kjaerulff and refers to earlier work on mobilities and art generated by the Cosmobilities Network. This third volume has two sections, both consisting of short papers and illustrations. The first section is based on artists who were part of the conferences' art exhibition, and the second part is based on theoretical reflections on art and artists.

A ravishing celebration of landscape, its iridescent beauty and its potential to comfort, awe and mesmerise. Landskipping explores the different ways in which we have, throughout the ages, responded to the land, beginning in the eighteenth century when artists first started to paint English scenery, and the Lakes, as well as Snowdon, began to attract a new kind of visitor, the landscape tourist. Meanwhile, at the same time, an entirely different band of people, the agricultural improvers, also travelled the land, looking at it in terms of its usefulness as well as its beauty. What emerges as universal then and now is a place's capacity to frame and define our experience. Moving from the rolling hills of Dorset to the peaks of the Scottish Highlands, this is an exquisite and compelling book, written by Anna Pavord with zest, passion and deep understanding.

Windtower offers a unique insight into a past way of life, exploring Dubai's rich and storied past and heritage. This new and extended edition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the formation of the United Arab Emirates, diving deeper into the merchant community's central role in Dubai's pre-oil economy and social life. This new edition also considers the lessons to be learned from Dubai's traditional windtowers at a time of global warming and climate crisis, and how this knowledge might benefit contemporary urban design. The title features a foreword from His Highness, Charles, Prince of Wales, who writes: "I do hope this book will enable other people to join in appreciating the unique nature of these buildings and that it will encourage an awareness of how relevant many of their distinctive features are to the modern challenges of building sustainable communities in a way that maximizes the use of renewable energy." With exclusive archival photography, custom maps, as well as original architectural plans and diagrams, Windtower is a must-have book for anyone interested in Dubai's architecture, culture and fascinating historical development.

This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the garden-the pergola-became a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature.

This book assesses the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and identifies lessons learned for governance and policy through this new and innovative approach to collaborative forest management. Unlike anything else in US public land management, the CFLRP is a nationwide program that requires collaboration throughout the life of national forest restoration projects, joining agency partners and local stakeholder groups in a kind of decade-long restoration marriage. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the governance dynamics of the program, examining: questions about collaborative governance processes and the dynamics of trust, accountability and capacity; how scientific information is used in making decisions and integrated into adaptive management processes; and the topic of collaboration through implementation, an underdeveloped area of collaborative governance literature. Bringing together chapters from a community of social science and policy researchers who have conducted studies across multiple CFLRP projects, this volume generates insights, not just about the program, but also about dynamics that are central to collaborative and landscape approaches to land management and relevant for broader practice. This volume is a timely and important contribution to environmental governance scholarship. It will be of interest to researchers and students of natural resource management, environmental governance, and forestry, as well as practitioners and policy makers involved in forest and ecosystem restoration efforts, and collaborative natural resource management more broadly.

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.

Walking, Landscape and Environment explores walking as a method of research and practice in the humanities and creative arts, emerging from a recent surge of growth in urban and rural walking. This edited collection of essays from leading figures in the field presents an enquiry into, and a critique of, the methods and results of cutting-edge 'walking research'. Walking negotiates the intersections between the human self, place and space, offering a cross-disciplinary collaborative method of research which can be utilised in areas such as ecocriticism, landscape architecture, literature, cultural geography and the visual arts. Bringing together a multitude of perspectives from different disciplines, on topics including health and wellbeing, disability studies, social justice, ecology and gender, this book provides a unique appraisal of the humanist perspective on landscape. In doing so, it challenges Romantic approaches to walking, applying new ideas in contemporary critical thought and alternative perspectives on embodiment and trans-corporeality.

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.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current housing practices across Asian cities based on facts and trends in the market. For many countries in Asia, the future of housing is now. This future is closely linked to successful theoretical advancement and policy practice in housing studies. This volume brings together twelve chapters divided across four thematic parts that sum up the concept and conditionality of housing in Asian cities. It studies housing through conceptual perspectives and empirical studies to explore established notions, cultures and practices relevant to the 21st-century post-reform context in Asia. Housing and property have long been economic drivers, leading many individual households towards better lives and associated social and community benefits, while also collectively improving the economic base of a city or country. This book examines the nature of the interplay of both state and market in the housing outcomes of these cities. With its extensive geographic coverage across South East Asia, South Asia, and the Far East and a cross section of different income groups, the book will interest reseachers and scholars in urban studies, architecture, development studies, public policy, political studies, sociology, policymakers in local and central governments, housing and planning professionals and commercial firms engaged in property markets or real estate in Asia. It will also provide ideas, tools and good practices for institutional enablement, stakeholders involved in these interventions, private sector organisations and NGOs.

The fully updated Short Guide to Town and Country Planning provides an concise introductory overview of the practice of planning for those with little or no prior knowledge. This second edition considers who planners are and what they do, showing how planning - as an art, science and system - has evolved as an organised action of the state. The book discusses the planning system, processes, legal constructs and approaches, taking into account the recent regulatory changes within the UK nations. Restructured to improve readability, it explores the interactions of government and society with the planning system, and the relationship between urban planning, the environment, and placemaking. It encourages the reader to adopt a reflective and inquisitive outlook, and features: * case study boxes; * further reading and resources; * guidance on the recent policy and system updates, including those through devolution.

Urban landscapes are usually thought of first and foremost as engineered formations designed for functionality. It is quite clear, however, that cities and towns are sites of social structure, scenes of diversity, and hotbeds of transgressions. They are also sources of satisfying social relationships, settings for actions negotiated on an everyday basis, and opportunities for kinesthetic and aesthetic experiences. Within these processes, the senses mediate engagement with the optimism of urban growth, the comfort of urban traditions, and a consciousness of the diverse relationships that embellish urban living, but also with the repellent sights and sounds that invade zones of comfort. This book examines how qualities of place and their sensuous reorganisation elucidate particular sociocultural expressions and practices in urban life. The collection illuminates how urban environments are distinguished, valued, or reconfigured with the senses as media for evaluating authentic spaces and places that endure and change over time.

This book considers the provisional nature of cities in relation to the Anthropocene - the proposed geological epoch of human-induced changes to the Earth system. It charts an environmental history of curfews, admonitions and alarms about dwelling on Earth. 'Provisional cities' are explored as exemplary sites for thinking about living in this unsettled time. Each chapter focuses on cities, settlements or proxy urbanisations, including past disaster zones, remote outposts in the present and future urban fossils. The book explores the dynamic, changing and contradictory relationship between architecture and the global environmental crisis and looks at how to re-position architectural and urban practice in relation to wider intellectual, environmental, political and cultural shifts. The book argues that these rounder and richer accounts can better equip humanity to think through questions of vulnerability, responsibility and opportunity that are presented by immense processes of planetary change. These are cautionary tales for the Anthropocene. Central to this project is the proposition that living with uncertainty requires that architecture is reframed as a provisional practice. This book would be beneficial to students and academics working in architecture, geography, planning and environmental humanities as well as professionals working to shape the future of cities.

Social cohesion is often perceived as being under threat from the increasing cultural and economic differences in contemporary cities and the increasing intensity of urban life. Public space, in its role as the main stage for social interactions between strangers, clearly plays a role in facilitating or limiting opportunities for social cohesion. But what exactly is social cohesion, how is it experienced in the public realm, and what role can the design of city spaces have in supporting or promoting it? There are significant knowledge gaps between the social sciences and design disciplines and between academia and practice, and thus a dispersed knowledge base that currently lacks nuanced insight into how urban design contributes to social integration or segregation. This book brings together scholarly knowledge at the intersection of public space design and social cohesion. It is based on original scholarly research and a depth of urban design practice, and analyses case studies from a variety of cities and cultures across the Global North and Global South. Its interdisciplinary, cross-cultural analysis will be of interest to academics, students, policymakers and practitioners engaged with a range of subject areas, including urban design, urban planning, architecture, landscape, cultural studies, human geography, social policy, sociology and anthropology. It will also have significant appeal to a wider non-academic readership, given its topical subject matter.

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city's program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris's local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris's role as a world city. The parks' development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras' cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc Andre-Citroen, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.

Le Corbusier is well-known for his architectural accomplishments, which have been extensively discussed in literature. Towards a Public Space instead offers a unique analysis of Le Corbusier's contributions to urban planning. The public spaces in Le Corbusier's plans are usually considered to break with the past and to have nothing whatsoever in common with the public spaces created before modernism. This view is fostered by both the innovative character of his proposals and by the proliferation in his manifestos of watchwords that mask any evocation of the past, like l'esprit nouveau ("new spirit") and l'architecture de demain ("architecture of tomorrow"). However, if we manage to rid ourselves of certain preconceived ideas, which underpin a somewhat less-than-objective idea of modernity, we find that Le Corbusier's public spaces not only didn't break with the historical past in any abrupt way but actually testified to the continuity of human creation over time. Aimed at academics and students in architecture, architectural history and urban planning, this book fills a gap in the systematic analysis of Le Corbusier's city scale plans and, specifically, Corbusian public spaces following the Second World War.

The concept of the neoliberal city has become a key structuring analytical framework in the field of urban studies. It explains both the ongoing transformation of urban policies and the socio-spatial effects of these policies within cities and highlights the prominent role of cities in the new geography of capitalism. Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this book challenges the neoliberal city thesis. It argues that the definition of neoliberalization may be more complex than it seems, resulting in over-simplified explanations of some processes, such as the rise of metropolitan governments or the importance given to urban economic development policies or gentrification. As a structuralist and macro-level theory, the "neoliberal city" does not shed light upon micro-level processes or identify and analyze actors' logics and practices. Finally, the concept is profoundly influenced by the historical trajectories of the United Kingdom and the United States, and the generalization of this experience to other contexts often leads to a kind of academic ethnocentrism. This book argues that, on its own, the current conceptualizations of neoliberalization are insufficient. Instead, it should be analyzed alongside other transformative processes in order to provide an analytical framework to explain the variety of processes of change, motivations and justifications too easily labelled as urban neoliberalism. This unique and critical contribution will be essential reading for students and scholars alike working in Human Geography, Urban Studies, Economics, Sociology and Public Policy.

The Japanese urban alleyway, which was once part of people's personal spatial sphere and everyday life has been transformed by diverse and competing interests. Marginalised through the emergence of new forms of housing and public spaces, re-appropriated by different fields, and re-invented by the contemporary urban design discourse, the social meaning attached to the roji is being re-interpreted by individuals, subcultures and new social movements. The book will introduce and discuss examples of urban practices which take place within the dynamic urban landscape of contemporary Tokyo to portray the life cycle of an urban form being rediscovered, commodified and lost as physical space.

In seeking to answer the question Whose Tradition? this book pursues four themes: Place: Whose Nation, Whose City?; People: Whose Indigeneity?; Colonialism: Whose Architecture?; and Time: Whose Identity? Following Nezar AlSayyad's Prologue, contributors addressing the first theme take examples from Indonesia, Myanmar and Brazil to explore how traditions rooted in a particular place can be claimed by various groups whose purposes may be at odds with one another. With examples from Hong Kong, a Santal village in eastern India and the city of Kuala Lumpur, contributors investigate the concept of indigeneity, the second theme, and its changing meaning in an increasingly globalized milieu from colonial to post-colonial times. Contributors to the third theme examine the lingering effects of colonial rule in altering present-day narratives of architectural identity, taking examples from Guam, Brazil, and Portugal and its former colony, Mozambique. Addressing the final theme, contributors take examples from Africa and the United States to demonstrate how traditions construct identities, and in turn how identities inform the interpretation and manipulation of tradition within contexts of socio-cultural transformation in which such identities are in flux and even threatened. The book ends with two reflective pieces: the first drawing a comparison between a sense of 'home' and a sense of tradition; the second emphasizing how the very concept of a tradition is an attempt to pin down something that is inherently in flux.

Writing landscapes inevitably occurs in dialogue with a long textual and pictorial tradition, but first-hand experience also provides key stimuli to many writers' accounts. This monograph employs a comparative lens to offer an intervention in debates between literary scholars who focus on genre and those cultural geographers who are concerned that self-perpetuating literary tropes marginalize practical engagements. Suggesting that representation and experience are not competing paradigms for landscape, Daniel Weston argues that in the hands of contemporary writers they are complementary forces building composite articulations of place. In five case studies, Weston matches a writer to a mode of apprehending place - W.G. Sebald with picturing, Ciaran Carson with mapping, Iain Sinclair with walking, Robert Macfarlane with engaging, Kathleen Jamie with noticing. Drawing out a range of sites at which representation and experience interact, Weston's argument is twofold: first, interaction between traditions of landscape writing and direct experience of landscapes are mutually influential; and second, writers increasingly deploy style, form, and descriptive aesthetics to recover the experience of place in the poetics of the text itself. As Weston shows, emergent landscape writing shuttles across generic boundaries, reflecting the fact that the landscapes traversed are built out of a combination of real and imaginary sources.

This book is a bridge between organismal/community approaches to food web dynamics and ecosystem-level approaches to production. It explains topics including autotrophy, heterotrophy, omnivory, decomposition, foraging behavior and theory, trophic cascades, bioenergetics, and production.