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Soft city : building density for everyday life
\"Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites-separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources-to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment\"-- Publisher's website.
Book
The great urban transformation : politics of land and property in China
This book emphasizes the centrality of cities in China's ongoing transformation. Based on fieldwork in twenty-four Chinese cities between 1996 and 2007, the author forwards an analysis of the relations between the city, the state, and society through two novel concepts: urbanization of the local state and civic territoriality. Urbanization of the local state is a process of state power restructuring entailing an accumulation regime based on the commodification of state-owned land, the consolidation of territorial authority through construction projects, and a policy discourse dominated by notions of urban modernity. Civic territoriality encompasses the politics of distribution engendered by urban expansionism, and social actors' territorial strategies toward self-protection. Findings are based on observations in three types of places. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized; their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.
eBook
City of Forests, City of Farms
City of Forests, City of Farms is a history of recent
urban forestry and agriculture policy and programs in New York
City. Centered on the 2007 initiative PlaNYC, this account tracks
the development of policies that increased sustainability efforts
in the city and dedicated more than $400 million dollars to trees
via the MillionTreesNYC campaign. Lindsay K. Campbell uses PlaNYC
to consider how and why nature is constructed in New York City.
Campbell regards sustainability planning as a process that unfolds
through the strategic interplay of actors, the deployment of
different narrative frames, and the mobilizing and manipulation of
the physical environment, which affects nonhuman animals and plants
as well as the city's residents.
Campbell zeroes in on a core omission in PlaNYC's original
conception and funding: Despite NYC having a long tradition of
community gardening, particularly since the fiscal crisis of the
1970s, the plan contained no mention of community gardens or urban
farms. Campbell charts the change of course that resulted from
burgeoning public interest in urban agriculture and local food
systems. She shows how civic groups and elected officials crafted a
series of visions and plans for local food systems that informed
the 2011 update to PlaNYC. City of Forests, City of Farms
is a valuable tool that allows us to understand and disentangle the
political decisions, popular narratives, and physical practices
that shape city greening in New York City and elsewhere.
eBook
Cities for Profit
Cities for Profit examines the phenomenon of urban real estate megaprojects in Asia—massive, privately built planned urban developments that have captured the imagination of politicians, policymakers, and citizens across the region. These controversial projects, embraced by elites, occasion massive displacement and have extensive social and economic impacts. Gavin Shatkin finds commonalities and similarities in dozens of such projects in Jakarta, Kolkata, and Chongqing. Shatkin is at the vanguard of urban studies in his focus on real estate. Just as cities are increasingly defined and remapped according to the value of the land under their residents' feet, the lives of city dwellers are shaped and constrained by their ability to keep up with rising costs of urban life. Scholars and policy and planning professionals alike will benefit from Shatkin's comprehensive research. Cities for Profit contains insights from more than 150 interviews, site visits to projects, and data from government and nongovernmental organization reports and data, urban plans, architectural renderings, annual reports and promotional materials of developers, and newspaper and other media accounts.
eBook
Design After Decline
Almost fifty years ago, America's industrial cities-Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and others-began shedding people and jobs. Today they are littered with tens of thousands of abandoned houses, shuttered factories, and vacant lots. With population and housing losses continuing in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, the future of neighborhoods in these places is precarious. How we will rebuild shrinking cities and what urban design vision will guide their future remain contentious and unknown.
InDesign After Decline, Brent D. Ryan reveals the fraught and intermittently successful efforts of architects, planners, and city officials to rebuild shrinking cities following mid-century urban renewal. With modern architecture in disrepute, federal funds scarce, and architects and planners disengaged, politicians and developers were left to pick up the pieces. In twin narratives, Ryan describes how America's two largest shrinking cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, faced the challenge of design after decline in dramatically different ways. While Detroit allowed developers to carve up the cityscape into suburban enclaves, Philadelphia brought back 1960s-style land condemnation for benevolent social purposes. Both Detroit and Philadelphia \"succeeded\" in rebuilding but at the cost of innovative urban design and planning.
Ryan proposes that the unprecedented crisis facing these cities today requires a revival of the visionary thinking found in the best modernist urban design, tempered with the lessons gained from post-1960s community planning. Depicting the ideal shrinking city as a shifting patchwork of open and settled areas, Ryan concludes that accepting the inevitable decline and abandonment of some neighborhoods, while rebuilding others as new neighborhoods with innovative design and planning, can reignite modernism's spirit of optimism and shape a brighter future for shrinking cities and their residents.
eBook
Design with nature now
\"This collection of essays and illustrated projects by landscape architects and planners from PennDesign celebrates the 50th anniversary of Ian McHarg's book about regional planning using natural systems, Design with Nature; showcases ecological design projects from around the world; and demonstrates McHarg's influence on contemporary landscape architects and other practitioners\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Urban land rent : Singapore as a property state
In Urban Land Rent, Anne Haila uses Singapore as a case study to develop an original theory of urban land rent with important implications for urban studies and urban theory. * Provides a comprehensive analysis of land, rent theory, and the modern city * Examines the question of land from a variety of perspectives: as a resource, ideologies, interventions in the land market, actors in the land market, the global scope of land markets, and investments in land * Details the Asian development state model, historical and contemporary land regimes, public housing models, and the development industry for Singapore and several other cities * Incorporates discussion of the modern real estate market, with reference to real estate investment trusts, sovereign wealth funds investing in real estate, and the fusion between sophisticated financial instruments and real estate
eBook