The Ultimate Book of Cities


Book Description

Where does the Express bus take you? How many swans are in the lake at the park? What replaces the shoe repair store? The Ultimate Book of Cities reveals the answers to these questions and much, much more in an oversized fact- and action-packed look at life in the big city! Featuring 59 flaps, pop-ups, pull tabs and movable parts, this all-you-need-to-know guide provides detailed information about what makes a city tick: from the different ways of getting around and what goes on in all the big buildings, to what traffic signs mean and who are all the people who keep the city in tip-top shape! It is a must-have volume to add to a young reader's library of The Ultimate Book series.




Two Cities


Book Description

From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces. Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader. The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.




Cities for People


Book Description

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.




The Great Cities in History


Book Description

A work of history, but also about art and architecture, trade and commerce, travel and exploration, economics and politics, this is above all a book about people and how, over the millennia, they have managed to live closely together. From the origins of urbanization in Mesopotamia to the global metropolises of today, great cities have marked the development of humankind Babylon and Nineveh, Athens and Rome, Istanbul and Venice, Timbuktu and Samarkand, their very names are redolent both of history and romance. The Great Cities in History tells their story from early Uruk and Thebes to Jerusalem and Alexandria. Then the fabulous cities of the first millennium: Damascus and Baghdad in the days of the Caliphates, Teotihuacan and Maya Tikal in Central America, and Changan, capital of Tang Dynasty China. The medieval world saw the rise of powerful cities: Palermo and Paris in Europe, Benin in Africa and Angkor of the Khmer. In the early modern world, we journey to Islamic Isfahan and Agra, and Prague and Amsterdam in their heyday, before arriving at the phenomenon of the contemporary mega-city: London and New York, Tokyo and Barcelona, Los Angeles and São Paulo. A galaxy of more than fifty distinguished authors, including Jan Morris, Colin Thubron, Simon Schama, Orlando Figes, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Misha Glenny, Adam Zamoyski and A. N. Wilson, evoke the character of each place and explain the reasons for its success, seeing what each city would have been like during its golden age.




Planet of Cities


Book Description

Nearly 4,000 cities on our planet today have populations of 100,000 people or more. We know their names, locations, and approximate populations from maps and other data sources, but there is little comparable knowledge about all these cities, and none that can be described as rigorously scientific. The Planet of Cities together with its companion volume, the Atlas of Urban Expansion, contributes to developing a science of cities based on studying all these cities together—not in the abstract, but with a view to preparing them for their coming expansion. The book puts into question the main tenets of the familiar Containment Paradigm, also known as smart growth, urban growth management, or compact city, that is designed to contain boundless urban expansion, typically decried as sprawl. It examines this paradigm in a broader global perspective and shows it to be deficient and practically useless in addressing the central questions now facing expanding cities outside the United States and Europe. In its place Shlomo Angel proposes to revive an alternative Making Room Paradigm that seeks to come to terms with the expected expansion of cities, particularly in the rapidly urbanizing countries in Asia and Africa, and to make the minimally necessary preparations for such expansion instead of seeking to contain it. This paradigm is predicated on four propositions:1. The expansion of cities that urban population growth entails cannot be contained. Instead we must make adequate room to accommodate it.2. City densities must remain within a sustainable range. If density is too low, it must be allowed to increase, and if it is too high, it must be allowed to decline.3. Strict containment of urban expansion destroys the homes of the poor and puts new housing out of reach for most people. Decent housing for all can be ensured only if urban land is in ample supply.4. As cities expand, the necessary land for public streets, public infrastructure networks, and public open spaces must be secured in advance of development.The first part of the book explores planetary urbanization in a historical and geographical perspective, to establish a global perspective for the study of cities. It confirms that we are in the midst of an urbanization project that started in earnest at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has now reached its peak with half the world population residing in urban areas, and will come to a close, possibly by the end of this century, when most people who want to live in cities will have moved there. This realization lends urgency to the call for preparing for urban expansion now, when the urbanization project is still in full swing, rather than later, when it would be too late to make a difference.The second part of the book seeks to deepen our understanding and thus lessen our fear of urban expansion by providing detailed quantitative answers to seven sets of questions regarding the dimensions and attributes of urban expansion:1. What are the extents of urban areas everywhere and how fast are they expanding over time?2. How dense are these urban areas and how are urban densities changing over time?3. How centralized are the residences and workplaces in cities and do they tend to disperse to the periphery over time? 4. How fragmented are the built-up areas of cities and how are levels of fragmentation changing over time?5. How compact are the shapes of urban footprints and how are their levels of compactness changing over time?6. How much land would urban areas require in future decades?7. How much cultivated land will be consumed by expanding urban areas?By answering these questions and exploring their implications for action, this book provides the conceptual framework, basic empirical data, and practical agenda necessary for the minimal yet meaningful management of the urban expansion process.The companion volume, Atlas of Urban Expansion, was also authored by Lincoln Institute visiting fellow Shlomo “




LIFE


Book Description

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.




Inventing Future Cities


Book Description

How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future. Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected; in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries. Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities; argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy; describes the future “high-frequency,” real-time streaming city; considers urban sprawl and urban renewal; and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovation—an unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.




The City


Book Description




World Cities, City Worlds


Book Description

When living and working in cities, we need to make sense of them in order to get by. We must delve below their surface to understand what makes them tick and how we can best engage with them. This book argues that three tropes can help us: namely, metaphors, icons and perspectives. Metaphorically, we can see the city as a community, a battleground, a marketplace, a machine or an organism. Some cities are iconic; they present us with characteristics that are more generally true of cities and city life, such as Venice, Mumbai, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles. Cities can also be viewed from different perspectives: those of artists, analysts, rulers and citizens. This book explores these ways of understanding cities, drawing on rich accounts of cities across the world and through time.




The American City


Book Description