Planning The Built Environment

Planning the Built Environment takes a systematic, technical approach to describing how urban infrastructures work. Accompanied by detailed diagrams, illustrations, tables, and reference lists, the book begins with landforms and progresses to essential utilities that manage drainage, wastewater, power, and water supply. A section on streets, highways, and transit systems is highly detailed and practical. Once firmly grounded in these "macro" systems, Planning the Built Environment examines the physical environments of cities and suburbs, including a discussion of critical elements such as street and subdivision planning, density, and siting of community facilities. Each chapter includes essential definitions, illustrations and diagrams, and an annotated list of references. This timely book explains new physical planning methods and current thinking on cluster development, new urbanism, and innovative transit planning and development. Planners, architects, engineers, and anyone who designs or manages the physical components of urban areas will find this book both an authoritative reference and an exhaustive, understandable technical manual of facts and best practices. Instructors in planning and allied fields will appreciate the practical exercises that conclude each chapter: valuable learning tools for students and professionals alike.

This book takes a sweeping view of the ways we build things, beginning at the scale of products and interiors, to that of regions and global systems. In doing so, it answers questions on how we effect and are affected by our environment and explores how components of what we make—from products, buildings, and cities—are interrelated, and why designers and planners must consider these connections.

This engaging and practical guide is a much-needed new textbook that illustrates the power of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis. Today's planner has a wealth of data available to them, much of which is increasingly linked to a specific location. From football clubs to Twitter conversations, government spending to the spread of diseases – data can be mapped. Once mapped, the data begins to tell stories, patterns are revealed, and effective planning decisions can be made. When used effectively, GIS allows students, planners, residents and policymakers to solve wicked problems in the environment, society and the economy. Geospatial data is now more freely available than it ever has been, as is much of the necessary software to analyse it. This contemporary text offers a practical guide to spatial analysis and what it can show us. In addition to explaining what GIS is and why it is such a powerful tool, the authors cover such topics as geovisualization, mapping principles, network analysis and decision making. Offering more than just theoretical or technical principles and concepts, the book applies GIS techniques to the real world, draws on global examples and provides practical advice on mapping the built environment. This accessible text is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking planning modules on GIS, data analysis and mapping, as well as for all planners, urbanists and geographers with an interest in how GIS can help us better understand the built environment from a socio-economic perspective.

This book is a comprehensive document visualizing the future of built environment from a multidisciplinary dimension, with special emphasis on the Indian scenario. The multidisciplinary focus would be helpful for the readers to cross-refer and understand others' perspectives. The text also includes case studies substantiating theoretical research. This method of composition helps the book to maintain rational balance among theory, research and its contextual application. The book comprises selected papers from the National Conference on Sustainable Built Environment. The chapters provide varied viewpoints on the core issues of urbanization and planning. This compilation would be of interest to students, researchers, professionals and policy makers.

This work aims to provide a possible specification of the problems involved in greening the built environment and an articulation of the solutions. It begins with a discussion of sustainability as a concept and its applicability to contemporary towns and cities. The following chapters take up particular aspects of the built environment and sustainability in greater depth and include the construction industry, transport, health, planning, community and equity issues, employment and the economy. The links between environmental damage, poverty and the economy are all themes in this book which also focuses on interconnections and on solutions to these three problems. The final chapter explains how the achievement of sustainable development is, in the authors' opinion, dependent on detailed solutions to everyday problems of modern society.

Planning Australia¿s Healthy Built Environments shines a quintessentially Australian light on the links between land use planning and human health. A burgeoning body of empirical research demonstrates the ways urban structure and governance influences human health¿and Australia is playing a pivotal role in developing understandings of the relationships between health and the built environment. This book takes a retrospective look at many of the challenges faced in pushing the healthy built environment agenda forward. It provides a clear and theoretically sound framework to inform this work into the future. With an emphasis on context and the pursuit of equity, Jennifer L. Kent and Susan Thompson supply specific ways to better incorporate idiosyncrasies of place and culture into urban planning interventions for health promotion. By chronicling the ways health and the built environment scholarship and practice can work together, Planning Australia¿s Healthy Built Environments enters into new theoretical and practical debates in this critically important area of research. This book will resonate with both health and built environment scholars and practitioners working to create sustainable and health-supportive urban environments.

Architectural programming – the analysis of any given environment to satisfy users’ needs – has become a given prerequisite to the design process. The programming process is often a complicated one: users’ present and future needs must be identified; space allowances, often predetermined, must be considered; equipment must be accommodated; all in the most cost-effective way possible. The variety of user groups is as wide as the variety of functions architecture can shelter; moreover, the different structures and needs of clients that fall within the same use classification differs so greatly that every program presents a new challenge. You cannot, for example, use the same program for every hospital you design. In Programming the Built Environment, first published in 1985, noted architect Wolfgang F. E. Preiser has compiled a wide range of architectural programs demonstrating applications of basic principles for different client groups. This book will be of interest to students of architecture and planning.

Cognition and the Built Environment argues that interacting with our built environment, as users and as architects, is a cognitive process. It claims that architecture, in its form and meaning, is a basic, embodied level of human cognition. The assumption is that we and our built environment together form an intelligent system, a cognitive feedback loop between us and the world of which we are part. With this as a vantage point, the book discusses the meaning and intelligence of concrete architectural environments as well as the agency of the architect, of his client and of the user. The inquiry oscillates between abstract thought, topological models and cognitive semiotics, between pragmatist philosophy and the professional practice of planning cities, developing projects and using objects. Architecture serves more complex purposes than our caves, paths and landmarks did. Written for students and academics of urban design, urban planning and architectural theory, Cognition and the Built Environment argues that human cognition feeds on the interaction between thought, agency and built environment, and that architecture is the spatial form of this interaction.