Download or read book Designing San Francisco written by Alison Isenberg and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major urban history of the design and development of postwar San Francisco Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners—those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design—to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s. Previous accounts of midcentury urban renewal have focused on the opposing terms set down by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs—put simply, development versus preservation—and have followed New York City models. Now Isenberg turns our attention west to colorful, pioneering, and contentious San Francisco, where unexpectedly fierce battles were waged over iconic private and public projects like Ghirardelli Square, Golden Gateway, and the Transamerica Pyramid. When large-scale redevelopment came to low-rise San Francisco in the 1950s, the resulting rivalries and conflicts sparked the proliferation of numerous allied arts fields and their professionals, including architectural model makers, real estate publicists, graphic designers, photographers, property managers, builders, sculptors, public-interest lawyers, alternative press writers, and preservationists. Isenberg explores how these centrally engaged arts professionals brought new ideas to city, regional, and national planning and shaped novel projects across urban, suburban, and rural borders. San Francisco’s rebuilding galvanized far-reaching critiques of the inequitable competition for scarce urban land, and propelled debates over responsible public land stewardship. Isenberg challenges many truisms of this renewal era—especially the presumed male domination of postwar urban design, showing how women collaborated in city building long before feminism’s impact in the 1970s. An evocative portrait of one of the world’s great cities, Designing San Francisco provides a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define the urban future.
Download or read book Shaping the City written by Rodolphe El-Khoury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking on the key issues in urban design, Shaping the City examines the critical ideas that have driven these themes and debates through a study of particular cities at important periods in their development. As well as retaining crucial discussions about cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Brasilia at particular moments in their history that exemplified the problems and themes at hand like the mega-city, the post-colonial city and New Urbanism, in this new edition the editors have introduced new case studies critical to any study of contemporary urbanism – China, Dubai, Tijuana and the wider issues of informal cities in the Global South. The book serves as both a textbook for classes in urban design, planning and theory and is also attractive to the increasing interest in urbanism by scholars in other fields. Shaping the City provides an essential overview of the range and variety of urbanisms and urban issues that are critical to an understanding of contemporary urbanism.
Download or read book Rebuilding the American City written by David Gamble and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban redevelopment in American cities is neither easy nor quick. It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns—yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, successes and challenges inherent to rebuilding American cities today. Rebuilding the American City is essential reading for practitioners and students in urban design, planning, and public policy looking for diverse models of urban transformation to create resilient urban cores.
Download or read book Design Guidelines in American Cities written by John Punter and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of design initiatives and policies in five US West Coast cities -- Seattle (including Bellevue), Portland, San Francisco, Irvine and San Diego--all of which have had particularly interesting urban design experience of relevance to practice in Britain and other countries.Although these cities are not a representative sample of all American design practice, they provide a rich vein of ideas about recent policy development and current initiatives which will stimulate thought about the formulation of effective design controls. The presentation of substantial extracts from key documents that underpin design controls in the five cities will be of interest, inspiration and practical use to academics and practitioners who want to know more about American practice and who want to contribute to improvements in the standards and quality of urban design policies and design control.The opening chapter provides a national context and a comparative framework for the study, with a focus on international perspectives, American planning systems and the development of criteria for comparison and evaluation. The five subsequentchapters take each city in turn, briefly reviewing the salient characteristics of each one before presenting an account of how planning and design policy have evolved in the last twenty-five years; key features of the contemporary systems of design control are highlighted and a summary evaluation is made. The focus in the case studies is on how policy and guidance have been formulated, structured and presented in the various documents that make up the policy framework, how the process of control operates, and how both respond to the criticisms commonly made of design and control. This final chapter draws general conclusions about the experience of the studied cities of wider relevance to American design review practice, but which are of interest to those engaged in design review and policy formulation everywhere.
Download or read book Mission District Urban Design Study written by and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A New Theory of Urban Design written by Christopher Alexander and published by Center for Environmental Struc. This book was released on 1987 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies written by Michael Storper and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth—luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor—do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does? The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components—economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors—to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.
Download or read book Urban Reinventions written by Lynne Horiuchi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of a twenty-first-century high-tech boom and in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, the city of San Francisco and its developers have proposed an ambitious model of military base reuse and green urbanism-a new eco-city of about 19,000 residents on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island. The project is synonymous with a growing global trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive land developments envisioned around ideas of sustainability and spectacular place making. Seen against the successive history of development, future visions for Treasure Island are part of a process of building and erasure that Horiuchi and Sankalia call urban reinventions. This is a process of radical change in which artificial, detached, and delimited sites such as Treasure Island provide an ideal plane for tabula rasa planning driven by property, capital, and state control.
Download or read book Urban Transformation written by Peter Bosselmann and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew. Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting. He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.
Download or read book The San Francisco Civic Center written by James Haas and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: San Francisco is known and loved around the world for its iconic man-made structures, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and Transamerica Pyramid. Yet its Civic Center, with the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States, is often overlooked, drawing less global and local interest, despite its being an urban planning marvel featuring thirteen government office and cultural buildings. In The San Francisco Civic Center, James Haas tells the complete story of San Francisco’s Civic Center and how it became one of the most complete developments envisioned by any American city. Originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912, the San Francisco Civic Center is considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a century ago. Haas meticulously unravels the Civic Center’s story of perseverance and dysfunction, providing an understanding and appreciation of this local and national treasure. He discusses why the Civic Center was built, how it became central to the urban planning initiatives of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, and how the site held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. He also delves into the vision for the future and related national trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends. Riddled with inspiration and leadership as well as controversy, The San Francisco Civic Center, much like the complex itself, is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of America’s most dynamic and creative cities.
Download or read book How to Study Public Life written by Jan Gehl and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance. Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space. In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.
Download or read book Cities of the Mississippi written by John William Reps and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Boulevard Book written by Allan B. Jacobs and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of the multiway boulevard and an argument for its revival, with design guidelines and historic examples. First built in Europe and grandly imported to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, the classic multiway boulevard has been in decline for many years, victim of a narrowly focused approach to street design that views unencumbered vehicular traffic flow as the highest priority. The American preoccupation with destination and speed has made multiway boulevards increasingly rare as artifacts of the urban landscape. This book reintroduces the boulevard, tree-lined and with separate realms for through traffic and for slow-paced vehicular-pedestrian movement, as an important and often crucial feature of both historic and contemporary cities. It presents more than fifty boulevards—as varied as Avenue Montaigne, in Paris; C. G. Road, in Ahmedabad, India; and The Esplanade, in Chico, California—celebrating their usefulness and beauty. It discusses their history and evolution, the misconceptions that led to their near-demise in the United States, and their potential as a modern street type. Based on wide research, The Boulevard Book examines the safety of these streets and offers design guidelines for professionals, scholars, and community decision makers. Extensive plans, cross sections, and perspective drawings permit visual comparisons. The book shows how multiway boulevards respond to many issues that are central to urban life, including livability, mobility, safety, interest, economic opportunity, mass transit, and open space.
Download or read book City Unsilenced written by Jeffrey Hou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.
Download or read book SURFACEDESIGN written by James A. Lord and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to present the work of Surfacedesign, an innovative San Francisco landscape architecture and urban design firm with major public and private projects throughout the Bay Area and in Hawaii, Mexico, and New Zealand. This monograph explores the design philosophy of the three partners of Surfacedesign, who are committed to solutions that emerge from the site itself and challenge conventional approaches to landscape. The work is informed by the vast openness and frontier spirit of the West, expressed in rugged materials and sustainable planting. Surfacedesign focuses on cultivating a sense of connection to the built and natural world, pushing people to engage with the landscape in new ways. The design approach emphasizes and celebrates the unique context and imaginative potential of each project. The studio's process is rooted in asking novel questions and listening to a site and its users, a process that has led to engaging and inspiring landscapes that are rugged, contemporary, and crafted. Twenty-five projects are presented, ranging in scale from the landscape approach to Auckland International Airport in New Zealand to intimate residential gardens in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Featured are Anaha, a Honolulu residential complex overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Land's End Lookout in the Golden Gate National Recreation area, Barnacles, a community gathering space on the Embarcadero, restoration of the Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma, the first commercial winery in California, and the landscape for the Museum of Steel in Monterrey, Mexico, a repurposed foundry that now incorporates the largest green roof in Central America.
Download or read book Urban Street Design Guide written by National Association of City Transportation Officials and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NACTO Urban Street Design Guide shows how streets of every size can be reimagined and reoriented to prioritize safe driving and transit, biking, walking, and public activity. Unlike older, more conservative engineering manuals, this design guide emphasizes the core principle that urban streets are public places and have a larger role to play in communities than solely being conduits for traffic. The well-illustrated guide offers blueprints of street design from multiple perspectives, from the bird’s eye view to granular details. Case studies from around the country clearly show how to implement best practices, as well as provide guidance for customizing design applications to a city’s unique needs. Urban Street Design Guide outlines five goals and tenets of world-class street design: • Streets are public spaces. Streets play a much larger role in the public life of cities and communities than just thoroughfares for traffic. • Great streets are great for business. Well-designed streets generate higher revenues for businesses and higher values for homeowners. • Design for safety. Traffic engineers can and should design streets where people walking, parking, shopping, bicycling, working, and driving can cross paths safely. • Streets can be changed. Transportation engineers can work flexibly within the building envelope of a street. Many city streets were created in a different era and need to be reconfigured to meet new needs. • Act now! Implement projects quickly using temporary materials to help inform public decision making. Elaborating on these fundamental principles, the guide offers substantive direction for cities seeking to improve street design to create more inclusive, multi-modal urban environments. It is an exceptional resource for redesigning streets to serve the needs of 21st century cities, whose residents and visitors demand a variety of transportation options, safer streets, and vibrant community life.
Download or read book Urban Design Reader written by Steve Tiesdell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-02-07 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential reading for students and practitioners of urban design, this collection of essays introduces the 6 dimensions of urban design through a range of the most important classic and contemporary key texts. Urban design as a form of place making has become an increasingly significant area of academic endeavour, of public policy and professional practice. Compiled by the authors of the best selling Public Places Urban Spaces, this indispensable guide includes all the crucial definitions and various understandings of the subject, as well as a practical look at how to implement urban design that readers will need to refer to time and time again. Uniquely, the selections of essays that include the works of Gehl, Jacobs, and Cullen, are presented substantially in their original form, and the truly accessible dip-in-and-out format will enable readers to form a deeper, practical understanding of urban design.
