The Prospect of Cities
Author: John Friedmann
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780816638840
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The City in History
Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1961
Total Pages: 788
ISBN-13: 9780156180351
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe city's development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.
The Divided City
Author: Alan Mallach
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2018-06-12
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 1610917812
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach presents a detailed picture of what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He spotlights these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social and political context. Most importantly, he explores the pervasive significance of race in American cities, and looks closely at the successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change. The Divided City concludes with strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity, firmly grounding them in the cities' economic and political realities.
Cities
Author: John Reader
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Published: 2007-12-01
Total Pages: 415
ISBN-13: 0802195733
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA “vastly entertaining” history of urban centers—from the ancient world to today (Time). From the earliest example in the Ancient Near East to today’s teeming centers of compressed existence, such as Mumbai and Tokyo, cities are home to half the planet’s population and consume nearly three-quarters of its natural resources. They can be seen as natural cultural artifacts—evidence of our civic spirit and collective ingenuity. This book gives us the ecological and functional context of how cities evolved throughout human history—the connection between pottery making and childbirth in ancient Anatolia, plumbing and politics in ancient Rome, and revolution and street planning in nineteenth-century Paris. This illuminating study helps us to understand how urban centers thrive, decline, and rise again—and prepares us for the role cities will play in the future. “A superb historical account of the places in which most of us either live or will live.” —Conde Nast Traveller
The Urban Prospect
Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: New York ; Harcourt, Brace & World
Published: 1968
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780156932011
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCollection of essays and papers.
A Prospect of Cities
Author: James Bryant Conant
Publisher:
Published: 1952
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDesign After Decline
Author: Brent D. Ryan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-05-22
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 0812206584
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlmost 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. In Design 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.
Urban Green
Author: Peter Harnik
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2012-07-16
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 1597268127
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor years American urban parks fell into decay due to disinvestment, but as cities began to rebound—and evidence of the economic, cultural, and health benefits of parks grew— investment in urban parks swelled. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands. Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks. The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.
Off the Books
Author: Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-06-30
Total Pages: 460
ISBN-13: 9780674044647
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate and remarkable ways in which a community survives. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.
The New Science of Cities
Author: Michael Batty
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2013-11
Total Pages: 519
ISBN-13: 0262019523
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks. In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and planning: that design of cities is collective action.
