Author : Kevin Lynch
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 28,79 MB
Release : 1984-02-23
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780262620468
A summation and extension of Lynch's vision for the exploration of city form. With the publication of The Image of the City in 1959, Kevin Lynch embarked upon the process of exploring city form. Good City Form is both a summation and an extension of his vision, a high point from which he views cities past and possible. First published in hardcover under the title A Theory of Good City Form.
Author : Kevin Lynch
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 21,94 MB
Release : 1964-06-15
Category : 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.
Author : Kevin Lynch
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 13,33 MB
Release : 1981-01
Category : Cities and towns
ISBN : 9780262120852
Available in paperback under the title "Good City Form"With the publication of "The Image of the City, " Kevin Lynch embarked on the process of exploration of city form. "A Theory of Good City Form, " his most important book, is both a summation and an extension of his vision, a high point from which he views cities past and possible.The central section of the book develops a new normative theory of city form--an identification of the characteristics that good human settlements "should" possess. This follows an examination of three existing normative theories--those which see the city as a model of the cosmos, as a machine, and as a living organism--which are shown to be finally inadequate and unable to hold up under sustained analysis. In addition, an appendix demonstrates the inadequacies of a number of functional theories--those whose aim is simply to describe "how" settlements work rather than to evaluate how they ought to work. Among these theories are models of cities as ecological systems, as fields of force, as systems of linked decisions, or as areas of class conflict.Lynch puts forth his own theory by searching out the qualities that produce good settlements, qualities that allow "development, within continuity, via openness and connection." He identifies five interrelated dimensions of performance--vitality, sense, fit, access, and control--and two "meta-criteria," efficiency and justice. As in all of Lynch's writing, the theory flows from and leads back to specific examples and everyday realities. The final section of the book is concerned with applications of the theory.
Author : Nigel Taylor
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 34,12 MB
Release : 1998-12-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780761960935
Taylor describes the development of urban planning ideas since the end of the Second World War, outlining the main theories from the traditional view of planning as an exercise in physical design to recent views of planning as 'communicative action'.
Author : Kevin Lynch
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 876 pages
File Size : 28,66 MB
Release : 1995-03-27
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780262620956
Kevin Lynch's books are the classic underpinnings of modern urban planning and design, yet they are only a part of his rich legacy of ideas about human purposes and values in built form. City Sense and City Design brings together Lynch's remaining work, including professional design and planning projects that show how he translated many of his ideas and theories into practice. An invaluable sourcebook of design knowledge, City Sense and City Design completes the record of one of the foremost environmental design theorists of our time and leads to a deeper understanding of his distinctively humanistic philosophy. The editors, both former students of Lynch, provide a cogent summary of his career and of the role he played in shaping and transforming the American urban design profession during the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Each of the seven thematic groupings of writings and projects that follow begins with a short introduction explaining their content and their background. The essays in part I focus on the premises of Lynch's work: his novel reading of large-scale built environments and the notion that the design of an urban landscape should be as meaningful and intimate as the natural landscape. In part II, excerpts from Lynch's travel journals reveal his early ideas on how people perceive and interpret their surroundings—ideas that culminated in his seminal work, The Image of the City. This part of the book also presents Lynch's experiments with children and his assessment of environmental-perception research. The examples of both small-scale and large-scale analysis of visual form in part III are followed by three parts on city design. These include Lynch's more theoretical works on complex planning decisions involving both functional (spatial and structural organization) and normative (how the city works in human terms) approaches, articles discussing the principles that guided Lynch's teaching and practice of city design, and descriptions of Lynch's own projects in the Boston area and elsewhere. The book concludes with essays written late in Lynch's career, fantasy pieces describing utopias and offering new design freedoms and scenarios warning of horrifying "cacotopias."
Author : Aseem Inam
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 41,41 MB
Release : 2013-10-23
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1135006393
While designers possess the creative capabilities of shaping cities, their often-singular obsession with form and aesthetics actually reduces their effectiveness as they are at the mercy of more powerful generators of urban form. In response to this paradox, Designing Urban Transformation addresses the incredible potential of urban practice to radically change cities for the better. The book focuses on a powerful question, "What can urbanism be?" by arguing that the most significant transformations occur by fundamentally rethinking concepts, practices, and outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: (a) beyond material objects: city as flux, (b) beyond intentions: consequences of design, and (c) beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations. To illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts through analysis of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city-design-and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.
Author : Jill Grant
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 24,47 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780415700740
An examination of new urban approaches both in theory and in practice. Taking a critical look at how new urbanism has lived up to its ideals, the author asks whether new urban approaches offer a viable path to creating good communities. With examples drawn principally from North America, Europe and Japan, Planning the Good Community explores new urban approaches in a wide range of settings. It compares the movement for urban renaissance in Europe with the New Urbanism of the United States and Canada, and asks whether the concerns that drive today's planning theory - issues like power, democracy, spatial patterns and globalisation- receive adequate attention in new urban approaches. The issue of aesthetics is also raised, as the author questions whether communities must be more than just attractive in order to be good. With the benefit of twenty years' hindsight and a world-wide perspective, this book offers the reader unparalleled insight as well as a rigorous and considered critical analysis.
Author : Christopher Alexander
Publisher : Center for Environmental Struc
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 42,36 MB
Release : 1987
Category : City planning
ISBN : 0195037537
The venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey a feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. But this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design, with architects absorbed in problems of individual structures, and city planners preoccupied with local ordinances, it is almost impossible to achieve. In this groundbreaking volume, architect and planner Christopher Alexander presents a new theory of urban design which attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. To discover the kinds of laws needed to create a growing whole in a city, Alexander proposes here a preliminary set of seven rules which embody the process at a practical level and which are consistent with the day-to-day demands of urban development. He then puts these rules to the test, setting out with a number of his graduate students to simulate the urban redesign of a high-density part of San Francisco, initiating a project that encompassed some ninety different design problems, including warehouses, hotels, fishing piers, a music hall, and a public square. This extensive experiment is documented project by project, with detailed discussion of how each project satisfied the seven rules, accompanied by floorplans, elevations, street grids, axonometric diagrams and photographs of the scaled-down model which clearly illustrate the discussion. A New Theory of Urban Design provides an entirely new theoretical framework for the discussion of urban problems, one that goes far to remedy the defects which cities have today.
Author : Aldo Rossi
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 19,90 MB
Release : 1984-09-13
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780262680431
Aldo Rossi was a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza and one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city's construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.
Author : Neil Brenner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 34,63 MB
Release : 2012-06-25
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1136625046
The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism. The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks – critical and otherwise – that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time. Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.
