This companion to Introducing Urban Design: Interventions and Responses shows how the principles and concepts of urban design can be applied and implemented in a range of real-world settings.

The Academy of Urbanism was founded in 2006 with a mission to recognise, encourage and celebrate great places across the UK, Europe and beyond, and the people and organisations that create and sustain them. This book is a compendium of seventy five places that have been shortlisted as part of the Academy's annual awards scheme which covers great Places, Streets, Neighbourhoods, Towns and Cities. Included are 75 places shortlisted between 2009 and 2013. Each has been visited by a team of Academicians who have spent time in the place, talked to officials and local people and sought to understand what it is that makes them special and how they have achieved what they have achieved. The Academy also commissions a poem, a drawing and a figure ground plan to understand and interpret the place. David Rudlin, Rob Thompson and Sarah Jarvis have drawn on this treasure trove of material to tell the story of these 75 places. In doing so they have created the most comprehensive compendium of great urban places to have been published for many years.

The high street is in crisis. How did we get here and what happens next? The global pandemic has made the crisis immeasurably worse but it wasn't the cause. The crisis was already raging in 2019 with thousands of store closures. Large retailers became complacent and failed to respond to changing consumer behaviour. Town centres are the victims of these changes rather than the cause of them. To understand the current crisis and how it might be addressed, this book takes a long view of retailing based on a hundred case studies. It looks at the way town centres responded to previous crises and explores current trends affecting town centres and how places are responding. The message is optimistic: adaptable town centres can once more become the diverse, characterful, independent places that existed before they were homogenised by big retail. Explore the past - understand the present - find a better future.

Urban Identity is the second in the successful Learning from Place series that draws upon the wealth of experience in the Academy of Urbanism. This edition deals with the subject of urban identity and character. Why is it that all modern towns and cities look the same, as they become dominated by identikit buildings, multi-national corporations, even arbitrarily imposed urban design rules? How can we preserve and foster the sense of local identity and character that so value without falling into the trap of historical pastiche?

Four leading urban thinkers take this theme as the staring point for chapters on urban identity. The classical architect Robert Adam delivers a broadside to modern architecture that he sees as the multi-national face of globalism. The architect and academic John Worthington ponders the difference between how a place is seen, its identity and how it wants to be seen, its brand. While the architects Anthony Reddy from Ireland and Frank Walker from Scotland explore the notion of local and national identity in architecture and design.

These chapters are interspersed with five chapters by leading practitioners inspired by the shortlisted places for the Academy s second annual awards. The surveyor Chris Balch revels in the life of three great European cities while Brian Evans, Chris Brett celebrate three towns that are really great small cities. David Rudlin looks at three creative quarters and what they contribute to the economic and social life of their host cities while Frank McDonald takes us on a journey down three great streets and David Taylor and Anthony Alexander applaud three urban places created created and improved in recent years.

Like the first book in this series, Urban Identity brims with fascinating and sometimes controversial insights and opinions on urbanism. Illustrated again by the drawings of David (Harry) Harrison and poems by Ian MacMillan and packed with photographs and plans of the places visited by the Academy as part of their awards scheme.

This successful title, previously known as 'Building the 21st Century Home' and now in its second edition, explores and explains the trends and issues that underlie the renaissance of UK towns and cities and describes the sustainable urban neighbourhood as a model for rebuilding urban areas. The book reviews the way that planning policies, architectural trends and economic forces have undermined the viability of urban areas in Britain since the Industrial Revolution. Now that much post-war planning philosophy is being discredited we are left with few urban models other than garden city inspired suburbia. Are these appropriate in the 21st century given environmental concerns, demographic change, social and economic pressures? The authors suggest that these trends point to a very different urban future. The authors argue that we must reform our towns and cities so that they become attractive, humane places where people will choose to live. The Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood is a model for such reform and the book describes what this would look like and how it might be brought about.

Human settlements are the result of a mix of self-organisation and planning. Planners are fighting a losing battle to impose order on chaotic systems. Connections between the process of urban growth and the fields of complexity theory are of increasing importance to planners and urbanists alike; the idea that cities are emergent structures created not by design but from the interplay of relatively simple rules and forces over time. From the the small Tuscan hill town to the megacities of Asia: the struggle between the planned and the unplanned is universal. The question is: can we rediscover the art of city planning that works with, rather than against the natural process of urban growth? Based on years of international research, Climax City is a critical exploration of the growth of cities and masterplanning. Challenging the idea that the city can be entirely planned on paper, this book implores you to work with chaos when planning cities. Beautifully illustrated with striking hand-drawn plans of global cities, this is a vital and accessible contribution to urban theory and planning. It's the perfect title for practitioners and academics across planning and urban design looking to make sense out of chaos.

Urban Identity is the second in the successful Learning from Place series that draws upon the wealth of experience in the Academy of Urbanism. This edition deals with the subject of urban identity and character. Why is it that all modern towns and cities look the same, as they become dominated by identikit buildings, multi-national corporations, even arbitrarily imposed urban design rules? How can we preserve and foster the sense of local identity and character that so value without falling into the trap of historical pastiche?

Four leading urban thinkers take this theme as the staring point for chapters on urban identity. The classical architect Robert Adam delivers a broadside to modern architecture that he sees as the multi-national face of globalism. The architect and academic John Worthington ponders the difference between how a place is seen, its identity and how it wants to be seen, its brand. While the architects Anthony Reddy from Ireland and Frank Walker from Scotland explore the notion of local and national identity in architecture and design.

These chapters are interspersed with five chapters by leading practitioners inspired by the shortlisted places for the Academy s second annual awards. The surveyor Chris Balch revels in the life of three great European cities while Brian Evans, Chris Brett celebrate three towns that are really great small cities. David Rudlin looks at three creative quarters and what they contribute to the economic and social life of their host cities while Frank McDonald takes us on a journey down three great streets and David Taylor and Anthony Alexander applaud three urban places created created and improved in recent years.

Like the first book in this series, Urban Identity brims with fascinating and sometimes controversial insights and opinions on urbanism. Illustrated again by the drawings of David (Harry) Harrison and poems by Ian MacMillan and packed with photographs and plans of the places visited by the Academy as part of their awards scheme.