Great Streets

In addition to offering detailed information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, this volume identifies and examines fifteen of the finest streets in the world.

Which are the world's best streets, and what are the physical, designable characteristics that make them great? To answer these questions, Allan Jacobs has surveyed street users and design professionals and has studied a wide array of street types and urban spaces around the world. With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared. It also reveals Jacobs's eye for the telling human and social details that bring streets and communities to life.An extensive introduction discusses the importance of streets in creating communities and criteria for identifying the best streets. The essays that follow examine 15 particularly fine streets, ranging from medieval streets in Rome and Copenhagen to Venice's Grand Canal, from Parisian boulevards to tree-lined residential streets in American cities. Jacobs also looks at several streets that were once very fine but are less successful today, such as Market Street in San Francisco, identifying the factors that figure in their decline.To broaden his coverage, Jacobs adds briefer treatments of more than 30 other streets arranged by street type, including streets from Australia, Japan, and classical antiquity in addition to European and North American examples. For each of these streets he has prepared plans, sections, and maps, all drawn at the same scales to facilitate comparisons, along with perspective views and drawings of significant design details.Another remarkable feature of this book is a set of 50 one square-mile maps, each reproduced at the same scale, of the street plans of representative cities around the world. These reveal much about the texture of the cities' street patterns and hence of their urban life. Jacobs's analysis of the maps adds much original data derived from them, including changes of street patterns over time.Jacobs concludes by summarizing the practical design qualities and strategies that have contributed most to the making of great streets.

"The best streets in the world's villages, towns, andcities—whether modest or grand—continually remind onethat simplicity is part of the recipe for success in this art. Theadvice of Victor Dover and John Massengale, their historic examplesand their own designs, reflect that simplicity." —From the Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales “Street Design is a lucid, practical andaltogether indispensable guide for envisioning andcreating vibrant 21st century towns and cities. It should berequired reading for every local political leader, planner,architect, real estate developer and engaged urban citizen inAmerica." —Kurt Andersen, host of Studio360 and author of TrueBelievers "We are going to start walking around the places we live again,and as that occurs and becomes normal, we will rapidly redevelop ademand for higher quality in building at the human scale." —From the Afterword by James Howard Kunstler “Your charrette traveling library must include theimportant Street Design book by Victor Dover and JohnMassengale.”—Bill Lennertz, ExecutiveDirector, National Charrette Institute “What an amazing resource! For those who wish thatmy book, Walkable City, had pictures, this is the book foryou. If either your work or your play includes the making ofplaces, you will find Street Design to be an invaluabletool.” —Jeff Speck, AICP, CNU-A, LEED-AP,Hon. ASLA Written by two accomplished architects and urban designers, thisuser-friendly street design manual shows both how to design newstreets and enhance existing ones. It offers step-by-stepinstruction and shares examples of excellent streets, examining theelements that make them successful as well as how they weredesigned and created. Topics also include strategies for shapingspace in the public right-of-way through correct building height tostreet width ratios, terminated vistas, landscaping, and streetgeometry. This book is a valuable resource for urban designers,planners, architects, and engineers. With guest essays from: Kaid Benfield, David Brussat, JavierCenicacelaya, Hank Dittmar, Andres Duany, Douglas Duany, EmilyGlavey, Chip Kaufman, Ethan Kent, Marieanne Khoury-Vogt, LéonKrier, Gianni Longo, Thomas Low, Laura Lyon, Chuck Marohn, PaulMurrain, John Norquist, Stefanos Polyzoides, Gabriele Tagliaventiand Erik Vogt.

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.

For one week in late July of 1877, America shook with anger and fear as a variety of urban residents, mostly working class, attacked railroad property in dozens of towns and cities. The Great Strike of 1877 was one of the largest and most violent urban uprisings in American history. Whereas most historians treat the event solely as a massive labor strike that targeted the railroads, David O. Stowell examines America's predicament more broadly to uncover the roots of this rebellion. He studies the urban origins of the Strike in three upstate New York cities—Buffalo, Albany, and Syracuse. He finds that locomotives rumbled through crowded urban spaces, sending panicked horses and their wagons careening through streets. Hundreds of people were killed and injured with appalling regularity. The trains also disrupted street traffic and obstructed certain forms of commerce. For these reasons, Stowell argues, The Great Strike was not simply an uprising fueled by disgruntled workers. Rather, it was a grave reflection of one of the most direct and damaging ways many people experienced the Industrial Revolution. "Through meticulously crafted case studies . . . the author advances the thesis that the strike had urban roots, that in substantial part it represented a community uprising. . . .A particular strength of the book is Stowell's description of the horrendous accidents, the toll in human life, and the continual disruption of craft, business, and ordinary movement engendered by building railroads into the heart of cities."—Charles N. Glaab, American Historical Review

From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence, a novel that "reflects our era's nighmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. Unfulfilled by the excess of fame and fortune his revolutionary image has wrought, he bolts from his band mid-tour to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. Great Jones Street is a penetrating look at rock and roll's merger of art, commerce and urban decay.

“This is a sensory history and a sensual story told from street level . . . a clear and powerful account of the transformation of street life in Europe.” —Leora Auslander, author of Taste and Power Merchants’ shouts, jostling strangers, aromas of fresh fish and flowers, plodding horses, and friendly chatter long filled the narrow, crowded streets of the European city. As they developed over many centuries, these spaces of commerce, communion, and commuting framed daily life. At its heyday in the 1800s, the European street was the place where social worlds connected and collided. Brian Ladd recounts a rich social and cultural history of the European city street, tracing its transformation from a lively scene of trade and crowds into a thoroughfare for high-speed transportation. Looking closely at four major cities—London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—Ladd uncovers both the joys and the struggles of a past world. The story takes us up to the twentieth century, when the life of the street was transformed as wealthier citizens withdrew from the crowds to seek refuge in suburbs and automobiles. As demographics and technologies changed, so did the structure of cities and the design of streets, significantly shifting our relationships to them. In today’s world of high-speed transportation and impersonal marketplaces, Ladd leads us to consider how we might draw on our history to once again build streets that encourage us to linger. By unearthing the vivid descriptions recorded by amused and outraged contemporaries, Ladd reveals the changing nature of city life, showing why streets matter and how they can contribute to public life. “[A] dazzlingly kaleidoscopic overview of city life, city living, and city dying.” —Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder