Grid/ Street/ Place


Book Description

Today's urban resident is seeking a more flexible, sustainable environment-representing a unique, diverse, vibrant, and responsible way of living-as an alternative to the typical development patterns of suburban and semi-urban sprawl. Can urban design help create this type of sustainable urbanism? Grid Street Place presents a unique approach to understanding urban design through scientific, empirical research. The authors examined more than 100 successful projects throughout North America to identify differences and commonalities, and they discovered universal elements that characterize sustainable urban districts. By applying these essential elements, designers and developers can recreate and extend the experience of successful places to their communities. Myriad plans, sections, diagrams, and charts illustrate how each district work-at an extremely detailed level. Concrete examples, as opposed to generalities, make Grid Street Place a must-read for anyone interested in the working strategies of urban design.




City on a Grid


Book Description

The never-before-told story of the grid that ate Manhattan




Cities of the Mississippi


Book Description

Spectacular modern aerial photographs of twenty-three of the towns dramatically illustrate changes to the urban scene and demonstrate the lasting influence of the initial city patterns on subsequent growth.




The Grid and the River


Book Description

"A collection of essays examining how patterns of use and attitudes to green spaces within Penn's city plan and along the Schuylkill informed notions of place from the time of Philadelphia's founding to the formation of the modern Fairmount Park system in the mid-19th century"--Provided by publisher.




Streets and Patterns


Book Description

There is an emerging consensus that urban street layouts should be planned with greater attention to ‘placemaking’ and urban design quality, while maintaining the conventional transport functions of accessibility and connectivity. However, it is not always clear how this might be achieved: we still tend to have different sets of guidance for main road networks and for local streetgrids. What is needed is a framework that addresses both of these, plus main streets – that don’t easily fit either set of guidance – in an integrative manner. Streets and Patterns takes up this challenge to create a coherent rationale to underpin today’s streets-oriented urban design agenda. Informed by recent research, the book looks behind existing design conventions and beyond immediate policy rhetoric, and analyses a range of first principles – from Le Corbusier and Colin Buchanan to New Urbanism. The book provides a new framework for the design and planning of urban layouts, integrating transport issues such as road hierarchy, arterial streets and multi-modal networks with urban design and planning issues such as street type, grid type, mixed-use blocks and urban design coding.




Streets and Patterns


Book Description

There is an emerging consensus that urban street layouts should be planned with greater attention to ‘placemaking’ and urban design quality, while maintaining the conventional transport functions of accessibility and connectivity. However, it is not always clear how this might be achieved: we still tend to have different sets of guidance for main road networks and for local streetgrids. What is needed is a framework that addresses both of these, plus main streets – that don’t easily fit either set of guidance – in an integrative manner. Streets and Patterns takes up this challenge to create a coherent rationale to underpin today’s streets-oriented urban design agenda. Informed by recent research, the book looks behind existing design conventions and beyond immediate policy rhetoric, and analyses a range of first principles – from Le Corbusier and Colin Buchanan to New Urbanism. The book provides a new framework for the design and planning of urban layouts, integrating transport issues such as road hierarchy, arterial streets and multi-modal networks with urban design and planning issues such as street type, grid type, mixed-use blocks and urban design coding.




The Image of the City


Book Description

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.




Urban Studies and Planning Terminology


Book Description

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 166. Chapters: Megacity, Gentrification, Ecovillage, Parkway, Grid plan, New Urbanism, Brownfield land, Urban sprawl, Shopping mall, White flight, Urbicide, Megalopolis, Accessibility, Unincorporated area, Terraced house, NIMBY, Habitat corridor, Megaregions of the United States, Smart city, Ciclovia, City block, Commuter town, Satellite town, Intelligent city, Green belt, Comprehensive planning, Land recycling, Urban open space, Conurbation, Walkability, Local community, Skyway, Blue Banana, Permeability, Facadism, Ekistics, Microdistrict, Land lot, Edge city, Village green, Urban agglomeration, Infill, Tree lawn, Boomburb, Greenway, Subdivision, Aerotropolis, Wildlife corridor, Placemaking, Charrette, Site analysis, Impervious surface, Residential area, Fused Grid, Downtown, Setback, Floor area ratio, Third place, Ecumenopolis, Overdevelopment, Walking audit, Transect, Built environment, City region, United States Micropolitan Statistical Area, Brownfield status, Local Nature Reserve, Regional park, Coving, List of road types by features, Open space reserve, Plattenbau, County island, Brusselization, Strip mall, Build-out, Metroplex, Two-step floating catchment area method, Fractal city, Civic center, Ecology of contexts, Forum, Mahala, Polycentrism, Back-to-back houses, Greyfield land, Barrioization, PLVI, Linear park, Isovist, Types of road, Linear city, City network, Terminating vista, Place identity, Cartesian skyscraper, Greenfield status, General plan, Beautification, Typology, Protected view, Abutter, Foreshoreway, Pocket park, Texaplex, Quarter, MIU, Synekism, Binary distribution, YIMBY, Community separator, Viewshed, Severance, Parklet, Microtown, Taskscape, Zone of transition, Desakota, Community Street Review, Greenfield land, Commercial area, Zone of Visual Influence, District Plan, Office complex, Elbow roomers, ..




Urban Grids


Book Description

Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design' is the result of a five-year design research project undertaken by professor Joan Busquets and Dingliang Yang at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The research that is the foundation for this publication emphasizes the value of open forms for city design, a publication that specifically insists that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. 'Urban Grids' analyzes cities and urban projects that utilize the grid as the main structural device for allowing rational development, and goes further to propose speculative design projects capable of suggesting new urban paradigms drawn from the grid as a design tool. Consisting of six major parts, it is divided into the following topics: 1) the atlas of grid cities, 2) grid projects through history, 3) the 20th-century dilemma, 4) the atlas of contemporary grid projects, 5) projective tools for the future, and 6) goodgrid city as an open form coping with new urban issues.




The Grid


Book Description

The electrical grid goes everywhere-it's the largest and most complex machine ever made. Yet the system is built in such a way that the bigger it gets, the more inevitable its collapse. Named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the National Academy of Engineering, the electrical grid is the largest industrial investment in the history of humankind. It reaches into your home, snakes its way to your bedroom, and climbs right up into the lamp next to your pillow. At times, it almost seems alive, like some enormous circulatory system that pumps life to big cities and the most remote rural areas. Constructed of intricately interdependent components, the grid operates on a rapidly shrinking margin for error. Things can-and do-go wrong in this system, no matter how many preventive steps we take. Just look at the colossal 2003 blackout, when 50 million Americans lost power due to a simple error at a power plant in Ohio; or the one a month later, which blacked out 57 million Italians. And these two combined don't even compare to the 2001 outage in India, which affected 226 million people. The Grid is the first history of the electrical grid intended for general readers, and it comes at a time when we badly need such a guide. As we get more and more dependent on electricity to perform even the most mundane daily tasks, the grid's inevitable shortcomings will take a toll on populations around the globe. At a moment when energy issues loom large on the nation's agenda and our hunger for electricity grows, The Grid is as timely as it is compelling.