Compact City

provides forum for progressing the urban debate demonstrates good design and practice through a variety of case studies offers cross-disciplinary view points

This collection of edited papers forms part of the Compact City Series, creating a companion volume to The Compact City (1996) and Achieving Sustainable Urban Form (2000) and extends the debate to developing countries. This book examines and evaluates the merits and defects of compact city approaches in the context of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Issues of theory, policy and practice relating to sustainability of urban form are examined by a wide range of international academics and practitioners.

This report is thus intended as “food for thought” for national, sub-national and municipal governments as they seek to address their economic and environmental challenges through the development and implementation of spatial strategies in pursuit of Green Growth objectives.

We need to control nature by eliminating its capricious threats to our lives. We do it best by not only making our living, working , sports and other leisure structures more accessible in space, but also by minimizing and banishing congestions and the need for long times to commute to work or to access shopping malls, sports and cultural activities. With the threat of global warming and melting of the polar ice cap in the Antarctic, low lying cities throughout the world are threatened with drowning under more than 150 feet of water. What should we be thinking about insulating ourselves from natural threats like hurricanes and tsunamis and earthquakes? Surprisingly enough, the new design will eliminate one of the problems of poverty, the lack of shelter.

This title was first published in 2000. Encouraging, even requiring, higher density urban development is a major policy in the European Community and of Agenda 21, and a central principle of growth management programmes used by cities around the world. This work takes a critical look at a number of claims made by proponents of this initiative, seeking to answer whether indeed this strategy controls the spread of urban suburbs into open lands, is acceptable to residents, reduces trip lengths and encourages use of public transit, improves efficiency in providing urban infrastructure and services, and results in environmental improvements supporting higher quality of life in cities.

Designing the City looks at current urban problems in cities and demonstrates how effective urban design can address social, economic and environmental issues as well as the physical planning at local level. The book is highly visual and illustrates the topic with a variety of sketches, line drawings, axonometrics and models. The author draws upon the valuable experience gained by the City of Glasgow and compares its solutions - successful and less successful - with projects in a variety of European countries.

Barcelona is regarded as a prototype of a European Mediterranean city with a long urban tradition. It has undergone a specific process of historic formation: density and compactness of urban form, evolution by extension rather than by reform. A history of urban planning necessarily includes a summary of the territorial and urban experience, the physical dimensions of the city that condition its cultural and economic development. This book centers on the construction of Barcelona, taking as its basis the most important planning operations and city projects, and drawing from diverse sources and phases. The local scale of many of the projects contrasts with the cosmopolitan aspirations that have made these interventions so innovative; including major projects for special events, such as the 1888 (World Exhibition), 1929 (Electrical Industries Exhibition) and 1992 (Olympic Games). New prospects are emerging from the recent European institutional framework, particularly changes in the economic system to a post-industrial phase. The urban planning history of Barcelona shows how the city has overcome major contradictions.