Download or read book The Human City written by Joel Kotkin and published by Agate Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism and The New Class Conflict challenges conventions of urban planning. Around the globe, most new urban development has adhered to similar tenets: tall structures, small units, and high density. In The Human City, Joel Kotkin―called “America’s uber-geographer” by David Brooks of the New York Times―questions these nearly ubiquitous practices, suggesting that they do not consider the needs and desires of the vast majority of people. Built environments, Kotkin argues, must reflect the preferences of most people―even if that means lower-density development. The Human City ponders the purpose of the city and investigates the factors that drive most urban development today. Armed with his own astute research, a deep-seated knowledge of urban history, and a sound grasp of economic, political, and social trends, Kotkin pokes holes in what he calls the “retro-urbanist” ideology and offers a refreshing case for dispersion centered on human values. This book is not anti-urban, but it does advocate a greater range of options for people to live the way they want at all stages of their lives. Praise for The Human City “Kotkin . . . presents the most cogent, evidence-based and clear-headed exposition of the pro-suburban argument . . . . In pithy, readable sections, each addressing a single issue, he debunks one attack on the suburbs after another. But he does more than that. He weaves an impressive array of original observations about cities into his arguments, enriching our understanding of what cities are about and what they can and must become.” —Shlomo Angel, Wall Street Journal “The most eloquent expression of urbanism since Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kotkin writes with a strong sense of place; he recognizes that the geography and traditions of a city create the contours of its urbanity.” —Ronnie Wachter, Chicago Tribune

Download or read book Soft City written by David Sim and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The City Is More Than Human written by Frederick L. Brown and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

Download or read book The Well Tempered City written by Jonathan F. P. Rose and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 PROSE Award Winner: Outstanding Scholarly Work by a Trade Publisher In the vein of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Jonathan F. P. Rose—a visionary in urban development and renewal—champions the role of cities in addressing the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century. Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the world’s population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, education and health disparities, among many others. In The Well-Tempered City, Jonathan F. P. Rose—the man who “repairs the fabric of cities”—distills a lifetime of interdisciplinary research and firsthand experience into a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape our cities with the goal of equalizing their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of “temperament” as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilization and nature. These goals may never be fully achieved, but our cities will be richer and happier if we aspire to them, and if we infuse our every plan and constructive step with this intention. A celebration of the city and an impassioned argument for its role in addressing the important issues in these volatile times, The Well-Tempered City is a reasoned, hopeful blueprint for a thriving metropolis—and the future.

Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Download or read book Human Aspects of Urban Form written by Amos Rapoport and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man—Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design discusses the man—environment interaction in urban setting. The book is comprised six chapters that provide a broad conceptual framework using a range of disciplines. The text first tackles urban design as the organization of space, time, meaning, and communication. The second chapter talks about environmental quality, while the third chapter deals with environmental cognition. Next, the book tackles the importance and nature of environmental perception. Chapter 5 discusses the city in terms of social, cultural, and territorial variables. Chapter 6 details the distinction between associational and perceptual worlds. The book will be of great interest to urban planners and government policymakers. Researchers and practitioners of sociological and behavioral science will also benefit from the book.

Download or read book Building the Human City written by Dr. John F. Kane and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building the Human City is a first overview of the award-winning yet quite diverse works of Jesuit philosopher William F. Lynch. Writing from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, Lynch was among the first to warn against the fierce polarizations prevalent in our culture wars and political life. He called for a transformation of artistic and intellectual sensibilities and imaginations through the healing discernments and critical ironies of an Ignatian (and Socratic) spirituality. Yet the breadth of his concerns (from cinema and literature to mental health and hope to secularization and faith) as well as the depth of his thought (philosophical as much as theological) led to little initial awareness of the overall vision uniting his writings. This book, while exploring that vision, also argues that the spirituality Lynch proposes is more needed today than when he first wrote.

Download or read book The Human City King s Cross Central 03 written by Roger Madelin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the third collaborative developer/architect studio at the Yale School of Architecture.

Download or read book Cities for Human Development written by Alexandre Apsan Frediani and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and others from the field of human development and capability debate, this book aims to approach city-making from the lens of the capability approach. What if we understand cities not as engines of growth but of human development? What if we see cities not for what they are, but what they do to people and nature?

Download or read book What a City Is For written by Matt Hern and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into gentrification and displacement, focusing on the case of Portland, Oregon's systematic dispersal of black residents from its Albina neighborhood. Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space—not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina—the one major Black neighborhood in Portland—has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and then contained there through exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and racist real estate practices. Since the 1990s, they've been aggressively displaced—by rising housing costs, developers eager to get rid of low-income residents, and overt city policies of gentrification. Displacement and dispossessions are convulsing cities across the globe, becoming the dominant urban narratives of our time. In What a City Is For, Matt Hern uses the case of Albina, as well as similar instances in New Orleans and Vancouver, to investigate gentrification in the twenty-first century. In an engaging narrative, effortlessly mixing anecdote and theory, Hern questions the notions of development, private property, and ownership. Arguing that home ownership drives inequality, he wants us to disown ownership. How can we reimagine the city as a post-ownership, post-sovereign space? Drawing on solidarity economics, cooperative movements, community land trusts, indigenous conceptions of alternative sovereignty, the global commons movement, and much else, Hern suggests repudiating development in favor of an incrementalist, non-market-driven unfolding of the city.

Download or read book Triumph of the City written by Edward Glaeser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award in 2011 “A masterpiece.” —Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics “Bursting with insights.” —The New York Times Book Review A pioneering urban economist presents a myth-shattering look at the majesty and greatness of cities America is an urban nation, yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly . . . or are they? In this revelatory book, Edward Glaeser, a leading urban economist, declares that cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in both cultural and economic terms) places to live. He travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and cogent argument, Glaeser makes an urgent, eloquent case for the city's importance and splendor, offering inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest creation and our best hope for the future.

Download or read book A City Is Not a Computer written by Shannon Mattern and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the "city-as-computer" metaphor, which undergirds much of today's urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city's many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs. Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Download or read book Human Transit written by Jarrett Walker and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-07-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public transit is a powerful tool for addressing a huge range of urban problems, including traffic congestion and economic development as well as climate change. But while many people support transit in the abstract, it's often hard to channel that support into good transit investments. Part of the problem is that transit debates attract many kinds of experts, who often talk past each other. Ordinary people listen to a little of this and decide that transit is impossible to figure out. Jarrett Walker believes that transit can be simple, if we focus first on the underlying geometry that all transit technologies share. In Human Transit, Walker supplies the basic tools, the critical questions, and the means to make smarter decisions about designing and implementing transit services. Human Transit explains the fundamental geometry of transit that shapes successful systems; the process for fitting technology to a particular community; and the local choices that lead to transit-friendly development. Whether you are in the field or simply a concerned citizen, here is an accessible guide to achieving successful public transit that will enrich any community.

Download or read book Human Cities written by Barbara Goličnik Marušić and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Human Cities: Celebrating Public Space' combines theoretical, practical and artistic approaches related to public space.

Download or read book Reimagining the More Than Human City written by Jamie Wang and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore. Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic new world city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites, from the futuristic, authoritarian Supertree Grove, positioned as a technologically sustainable solution to a velocity-charged and singular urban transportation system, to highly protected nature reserves and to the cemeteries, where graves and memories continue to be exhumed and erased to make way for development. Wang also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, Wang ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments.

Download or read book The Nutrients of Human City written by Oliver Street and published by . This book was released on 2019-04 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nutrients of Human City takes you on a guided tour of the vitamins, minerals and macro-nutrients that are required in the human diet. Every nutrient is represented as a character with a detailed profile which includes a job description to help you to understand his or her role in the body. Use the key sources information to see which nutrients you are recruiting in the food that you eat, and at the back of the book there is a healthy eating guide along with a helpful glossary section to explain unfamiliar words. The Nutrients of Human City is written in an educational and fun way that will appeal to children, young adults and big kids alike.