The Art of City Sketching: A Field Manual guides you through the laborious and sometimes complex process of sketching what you see in the built environment so that you can learn to draw what you imagine. Illustrated with hundreds of drawings by students and professionals of cityscapes around Europe and the United States, the book helps you develop your conceptual drawing skills so that you can communicate graphically to represent the built environment. Short exercises, projects, drawing tips, step-by-step demonstrations, and composition do's and don'ts make it easy for you to get out into the city and experiment in your own work. Author Michael Abrams uses his experience as a field sketching instructor, to show you that by drawing, you can discover, analyze, and comprehend the built environment.
This classic is organized as follows: I. The Relationship Between Buildings, Monuments, and Public Squares II. Open Centers of Public Places III. The Enclosed Character of the Public Square IV. The Form and Expanse of Public Squares V. The Irregularity of Ancient Public Squares VI. Groups of Public Squares VII. Arrangement of Public Squares in Northern Europe VIII. The Artless and Prosaic Character of Modern City Planning IX. Modern Systems X. Modern Limitations on Art in City Planning XI. Improved Modern Systems XII. Artistic Principles in City Planning— An Illustration XIII. Conclusion
City-making is an art, not a formula. The skills required to re-enchant the city are far wider than the conventional ones like architecture, engineering and land-use planning. There is no simplistic, ten-point plan, but strong principles can help send good city-making on its way. The vision for 21st century cities must be to be the most imaginative cities for the world rather than in the world. This one change of word - from 'in' to 'for' - gives city-making an ethical foundation and value base. It helps cities become places of solidarity where the relations between the individual, the group, outsiders to the city and the planet are in better alignment. Following the widespread success of The Creative City, this new book, aided by international case studies, explains how to reassess urban potential so that cities can strengthen their identity and adapt to the changing global terms of trade and mass migration. It explores the deeper fault-lines, paradoxes and strategic dilemmas that make creating the 'good city' so difficult.
The Art of Building a Garden City is a well-researched guide to the history of the garden city movement and the delivery of a new generation of communities for the 21st Century. Bringing together key findings from the TCPA’s campaign work, and drawing on lessons from the first garden cities, the new towns programme and other large-scale developments, it identifies what steps need to be taken in order to deliver the highest standards of design and place making today.
"An accomplished architect and urbanist goes back to the roots of what makes cities attractive and livable, demonstrating how we can restore function and beauty to our urban spaces for the long term. Nearly everything we treasure in the worldÕs most beautiful cities was built over a century ago. Cities like Prague, Paris, and Lisbon draw millions of visitors from around the world because of their exquisite architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and human scale. Yet a great deal of the knowledge and practice behind successful city planning has been abandoned over the last hundred yearsÑnot because of traffic, population growth, or other practical hurdles, but because of ill-considered theories emerging from Modernism and reactions to it. The errors of urban design over the last century are too great not to question. The solutions being offered todayÑsustainability, walkability, smart and green technologiesÑhint at what has been lost and what may be regained, but they remain piecemeal and superficial. In The Art of Classic Planning, architect and planner Nir Haim Buras documents and extends the time-tested and holistic practices that held sway before the reign of Modernism. With hundreds of full-color illustrations and photographs that will captivate architects, planners, administrators, and developers, The Art of Classic Planning restores and revitalizes the foundations of urban planning. Inspired by venerable cities like Kyoto, Vienna, and Venice, and by the great successes of LÕEnfantÕs Washington, HaussmannÕs Paris, and BurnhamÕs Chicago, Buras combines theory and a host of examples to arrive at clear guidelines for best practices in classic planning for todayÕs world. The Art of Classic Planning celebrates the enduring principles of urban design and invites us to return to building beautiful cities."
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
A major urban history of the design and development of postwar San Francisco Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners—those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design—to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s. Previous accounts of midcentury urban renewal have focused on the opposing terms set down by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs—put simply, development versus preservation—and have followed New York City models. Now Isenberg turns our attention west to colorful, pioneering, and contentious San Francisco, where unexpectedly fierce battles were waged over iconic private and public projects like Ghirardelli Square, Golden Gateway, and the Transamerica Pyramid. When large-scale redevelopment came to low-rise San Francisco in the 1950s, the resulting rivalries and conflicts sparked the proliferation of numerous allied arts fields and their professionals, including architectural model makers, real estate publicists, graphic designers, photographers, property managers, builders, sculptors, public-interest lawyers, alternative press writers, and preservationists. Isenberg explores how these centrally engaged arts professionals brought new ideas to city, regional, and national planning and shaped novel projects across urban, suburban, and rural borders. San Francisco’s rebuilding galvanized far-reaching critiques of the inequitable competition for scarce urban land, and propelled debates over responsible public land stewardship. Isenberg challenges many truisms of this renewal era—especially the presumed male domination of postwar urban design, showing how women collaborated in city building long before feminism’s impact in the 1970s. An evocative portrait of one of the world’s great cities, Designing San Francisco provides a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define the urban future.
An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities’ development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners’ dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities’ productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.
This book examines public art outside the normal confines of art criticism and places it within broader contexts of public space and gender by exploring both the aesthetic and political aspects of the medium.
