Architecture And The Urban Experience

Embracing a biological and evolutionary perspective to explain the human experience of place, Urban Experience and Design explores how cognitive science and biometric tools provide an evidence-based foundation for architecture and planning. Aiming to promote the creation of a healthier and happier public realm, this book describes how unconscious responses to stimuli, outside our conscious awareness, direct our experience of the built environment and govern human behavior in our surroundings. This collection contains 15 chapters, including contributions from researchers in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Iran. Addressing topics such as the impact of eye-tracking analysis and seeing beauty and empathy within buildings, Urban Experience and Design encourages us to reframe our understanding of design, including the narrative of how modern architecture and planning came to be in the first place. This volume invites students, academics and scholars to see how cognitive science and biometric findings give us remarkable 21st-century metrics for evaluating and improving designs, even before they are built.

Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience explores the ways in which scholars from a variety of disciplines - history, history of art, geography and architecture - think about and study the urban environment. The concept ’cityscapes’ refers to three different dynamics that shape the development of the urban environment: the interplay between conscious planning and organic development, the tension between social control and its unintended consequences and the relationship between projection and self-presentation, as articulated through civic ceremony and ritual. The book is structured around three sections, each covering a particular aspect of the urban experience. ’The City Planned’ looks at issues related to agency, self-perception, the transfer of knowledge and the construction of space. ’The City Lived’ explores the experience of urbanity and the construction of space as a means of social control. And finally, ’The City as a Stage’ examines the ways in which cultural practices and power-relations shape - and are in turn shaped by - the construction of space. Each section combines the work of scholars from different fields who examine these dynamics through both theoretical essays and empirical research, and provides a coherent framework in which to assess a wide range of chronological and geographical subjects. Taken together the essays in this volume provide a truly interdisciplinary investigation of the urban phenomenon. By making fascinating connections between such seemingly diverse topics as 15th century France and modern America, the collection raises valuable questions about scholarly approaches to urban studies.

Urban Design the American Experience Jon Lang Urban Design: The American Experience places social and environmental concerns within the context of American history. It returns the focus of urban design to the creation of a better world. It evaluates the efforts of designers who apply knowledge about the environment and people to the creation of livable, enjoyable, and even inspiring built worlds. Urban Design: The American Experience emphasizes that urban design must take a user-oriented approach to achieve a higher quality of life in human settlements. All the keys to this approach are spelled out in chapters that address: Urban design as both a product and process of communal decision-making Types of knowledge required as a base for urban design action How to apply recent environmental and behavioral research to professional design How human needs are fulfilled through design The true role of functionalism in design Urban design efforts of the twentieth century in the United States are examined within their socio-political context. Jon Lang reviews the urban design experience from the beginning of the "City Beautiful" movement, paying particular attention to developments since World War II. He explores how the twentieth-century city has developed, as well as discusses the attitudes that have driven major movements in urban design. Readers learn a neo-Modernist approach that builds on the successes and failures of Rationalism and Empiricism, the two major streams of Modernist thought in architecture and urban design. They also gain an understanding of how the environment is experienced by people, and the implications of this experiencing for architectural and urban design. Numerous illustrations throughout demonstrate how various design schemes can be used. Urban Design: The American Experience provides architects, designers, city planners, and students in these fields with a model for their own future development as professionals. It is a valuable guide to design methodology (procedural theory) and other issues related to creating optimal urban environments.

This book provides a representative selection of the highest quality papers submitted to the IAPS 13 conference held in Manchester in 1994. The papers are concerned with current research on the experience of living in cities and are drawn from developed, developing and under-developed countries in all parts of the world.

The starting point of this book is the observation that there is a discrepancy between the lived reality of human beings and the fabricated, planned, and governed ‘reality’ of the state apparatus at both the local and national level. The book posits multi-locality as an emerging spatial configuration. The author draws from various theoretical sources, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of state or royal science, the Nietzschean critique of idealism, Hägerstrnad’s time-geography, Hintikka’s theory of modalities, Lefebvre’s urban society, Castel’s network society, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Bhaskar’s and Sartre's theories of presence and absence. He also discusses the implications of Faludi’s post-territorialist critique of planning and governance, and of the failure to operationalise the concept quantitively, basing his arguments in the lived experiences of multi-locals as well. The novelty of the book is how it analyses multi-locality from such a wide theoretical perspective: what is the nature and meaning of the different multiple and coexistent places for people, and how is this spatial transformation related to their mobility, everyday practices, and work. How does the presence and absence of places form their identity and their citizenship? He also addresses the inconsistency between multi-locality and traditional statistics and the planning and governance practices based on the assumption of unilocality and discusses the implications of this incongruity. The book will be of interest to scholars in urban studies and planning theory, as well as practitioners developing more adequate practices replacing outdated ones.

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies and the often unacknowledged debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe one another. From the foundations of modern urban theory in the work of Weber, Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebbvre to the writings of contemporary urban theorists such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells and the Los Angeles school of urbanism, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience traces the key developments in the idea of the city over more than a century. Individual chapters explore investigative studies of the great metropolis from Charles Booth to the contemporary urban research of William J. Wilson, along with alternative approaches to the industrial city, ranging from the Garden City Movement to ‘the new urbanism’. The volume also considers the impact of new information and communication technologies, and the growing trend towards disaggregated urban networks, all of which raise important questions about viability and physical and social identity of the conventional townscape. Urban Theory and the Urban Experience concludes with a rallying cry for a more holistic and integrated approach to the urban question in theory and in practice if the rich potent. For the benefit of students and tutors, frequent question points encourage exploration of key themes, and annotated further readings provide follow-up sources for the issues raised in each chapter. The book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners and all those who wish to learn more about why the urban has become the dominant social, economic and cultural form of the twenty-first century

Tourism in European Cities explores the relationship between tourist activity and the architecture and built environment within which it takes place. This is the first book to consider urban tourism with a particular focus on European cities. Tourism in European Cities considers the tourist experience and the various elements that shape it. In many cities, the historic core plays a crucial role in tourism either as the location of the more important attractions, or as an attraction in its own right. The book dedicates a chapter to urban heritage and its relationship to tourism, including urban conservation and UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Another chapter considers contemporary architecture and debates some cities’ efforts to use iconic architecture, in particular, to enhance their attractiveness in the context of increased competition between cities. In the context of competition, many cities are resorting to events as a strategy to reposition and differentiate themselves from other cities. Major events are accompanied by major investment in event venues and in urban infrastructure. The city often serves as a backdrop to the urban festival as activities and performances are staged in the city’s urban spaces. This book is essential reading for students of tourism and urban geography. It is also of interest to students of urban planning and architecture, and anyone keen to learn more about tourism and European cities.