Building Cities to LAST

Building Cities to LAST
Author: Jassen Callender
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000510697

Building Cities to LAST presents the myriad issues of sustainable urbanism in a clear and concise system, and supports holistic thinking about sustainable development in urban environments by providing four broad measures of urban sustainability that differ radically from other, less long-lived patterns: these are Lifecycle, Aesthetics, Scale, and Technology (LAST). This framework for understanding the relationship between these four measures and the essential types of infrastructure—grouped according to the basic human needs of Food, Shelter, Mobility, and Water—is laid out in a simple and easy-to-understand format. These broad measures and infrastructures address the city as a whole and as a recognizable pattern of human activity and, in turn, increase the ability of cities—and the human race—to LAST. This book will find wide readership particularly among students and young practitioners in architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture.

Soft City

Soft City
Author: David Sim
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642830186

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.

Creating Cities/Building Cities

Creating Cities/Building Cities
Author: Peter Karl Kresl
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-12-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1786431610

For the past 150 years, architecture has been a significant tool in the hands of city planners and leaders. In Creating Cities/Building Cities, Peter Karl Kresl and Daniele Ietri illustrate how these planners and leaders have utilized architecture to achieve a variety of aims, influencing the situation, perception and competitiveness of their cities.

Creating Cities

Creating Cities
Author: Marcus Westbury
Publisher:
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780992568740

In 2008, Marcus Westbury returned to his hometown of Newcastle, Australia, and found more than 150 empty buildings lining its two main streets. Three years later, the world's largest travel publisher named Newcastle one of the top ten cities in the world to visit. Creating Cities is about the unlikely events in between: of how a failed idea to start a bar morphed into a scheme that has helped transform Newcastle, launched more than two hundred creative and community projects across Australia, and is fast becoming a model for cities and towns around the world. In an engaging, thoughtful, and observational style, Westbury argues that most towns and cities are wasting their most obvious assets: the talent, imagination, and passion of the people that live there. In a globalised age, local creativity has access to new possibilities that most places have barely begun to grasp. In this book, Westbury explains how small-scale failures in Newcastle inspired a larger set of ideas and a 'why-to' strategy with potential applications around the globe. Creating Cities is a provocative and inspiring must-read for creative people, civic and business leaders, town planners, citizens, and anyone who cares about the communities that they live in.

Cities for People

Cities for People
Author: Jan Gehl
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1597269840

For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people. Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale. For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. A “Toolbox,” presenting key principles, overviews of methods, and keyword lists, concludes the book. The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.

Building and Dwelling

Building and Dwelling
Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-08-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300274769

A reflection on the past and present of city life, and a bold proposal for its future “Constantly stimulating ideas from a veteran of urban thinking.”—Jonathan Meades, The Guardian In this sweeping work, the preeminent sociologist Richard Sennett traces the anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. He shows how Paris, Barcelona, and New York City assumed their modern forms; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others; and takes us on a tour of emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellín, Colombia, to Google headquarters in Manhattan. Through it all, Sennett laments that the “closed city”—segregated, regimented, and controlled—has spread from the Global North to the exploding urban centers of the Global South. He argues instead for a flexible and dynamic “open city,” one that provides a better quality of life, that can adapt to climate change and challenge economic stagnation and racial separation. With arguments that speak directly to our moment—a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before—Sennett forms a bold and original vision for the future of cities.

The Art of Building Cities

The Art of Building Cities
Author: Camillo Sitte
Publisher: Ravenio Books
Total Pages: 199
Release:
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

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

The Image of the City

The Image of the City
Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1964-06-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262620017

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.

Sustainable Communities Design Handbook

Sustainable Communities Design Handbook
Author: Woodrow W. Clark II
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2010-07-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0080963366

The objective of Sustainable Communities Design Handbook is to ensure a better quality of life for everyone, both now and for generations to come. This means creating a better and safer environment internationally through the sustainable use of natural resources, encouraging sustainable development which supports a strong economy, and ensuring a high quality environment that can be enjoyed by all. Sustainable Development Partnerships brings together in one reference today's most cutting edge technologies and methods for creating sustainable communities. With this book, Environmental Engineers, Civil Engineers, Architects, Mechanical Engineers, and Energy Engineers find a common approach to building environmental friendly communities which are energy efficient. The five part treatment starts with a clear and rigorous exposition of sustainable development in practice, followed by self-contained chapters concerning applications. - Methods for the sustainable use of natural resources in built communities - Clearly explains the most cutting edge sustainable technologies - Provides a common approach to building sustainable communities - Coverage of sustainable practices from architecture to construction

Radical Cities

Radical Cities
Author: Justin McGuirk
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781688680

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.