Sense Of The City

With essays by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Norman Pressman, Emily Thompson, Mirko Zardini, Constance Classen and David Howes.

Kevin Lynch's books are the classic underpinnings of modern urban planning and design, yet they are only a part of his rich legacy of ideas about human purposes and values in built form. City Sense and City Design brings together Lynch's remaining work, including professional design and planning projects that show how he translated many of his ideas and theories into practice. An invaluable sourcebook of design knowledge, City Sense and City Design completes the record of one of the foremost environmental design theorists of our time and leads to a deeper understanding of his distinctively humanistic philosophy. The editors, both former students of Lynch, provide a cogent summary of his career and of the role he played in shaping and transforming the American urban design profession during the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Each of the seven thematic groupings of writings and projects that follow begins with a short introduction explaining their content and their background. The essays in part I focus on the premises of Lynch's work: his novel reading of large-scale built environments and the notion that the design of an urban landscape should be as meaningful and intimate as the natural landscape. In part II, excerpts from Lynch's travel journals reveal his early ideas on how people perceive and interpret their surroundings—ideas that culminated in his seminal work, The Image of the City. This part of the book also presents Lynch's experiments with children and his assessment of environmental-perception research. The examples of both small-scale and large-scale analysis of visual form in part III are followed by three parts on city design. These include Lynch's more theoretical works on complex planning decisions involving both functional (spatial and structural organization) and normative (how the city works in human terms) approaches, articles discussing the principles that guided Lynch's teaching and practice of city design, and descriptions of Lynch's own projects in the Boston area and elsewhere. The book concludes with essays written late in Lynch's career, fantasy pieces describing utopias and offering new design freedoms and scenarios warning of horrifying "cacotopias."

The papers collected in this volume discuss the sensory dimension of cityscapes, with focus on touch and smell. Both have been traditionally considered "lower senses" and thus unworthy of being cultivated - objects of social prohibitions and targets of suppressing strategies in modern architecture and city planning. The book brings together approaches from anthropology, aesthetics, the theory of architecture, art and design research, psychophysiology, ethology, analytic chemistry, etc. (Series: Austria: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Interdisziplinar - Vol. 4)

In 2000, for the first time, a majority of the world's population was living in cities. The trend towards increasing urbanization shows no sign of slowing and the third millennium looks set to be an unprecedentedly urban one. 'Making Sense of Cities' provides an up-to-date, vibrant and accessible introduction to urban geography. It offers students a sense of the patterns and processess of urbanization and the spatial organisation of cities, recognizing the significance of globalization, economics, politics and culture from a range of perspectives. Above all, it seeks to provide a relevant approach, inviting students to engage with competing theories of the urban and to assess them against the background of their own opinions and personal experience. Examples and case studies are drawn from a range of international settings, from San Francisco to Shanghai, Sydney to Singapore, giving a genuinely global coverage. The book is written in a fresh and engaging stlye, and is fully illustrated throughout. It is designed to appeal to any student of the urban and will be essential to students of geography, urban studies, town planning and land economy.

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.

In A Sense of the City, Follaco examines Nagai Kafū’s (1879-1959) urban representation, both at home and abroad, to define his position within the context of pre-war Japanese literature while touching upon crucial issues of modernity.

A native Texan who lived and worked in the Austin area for more than twenty years, Joshua Long is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at Franklin College Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland. --Book Jacket.

A little girl's belief in Santa is restored in this ode to the magic of Christmas. This is a holiday gift readers will treasure for years to come! It's two weeks before Christmas, and Deja is worried that Santa might not be able to visit her--after all, as a city kid, she doesn't have a chimney for him to come down and none of the parking spots on her block could fit a sleigh, let alone eight reindeer! But with a little help from her family, community, and Santa himself, Deja discovers that the Christmas spirit is alive and well in her city. With bold, colorful illustrations that capture the joy of the holidays, this picture book from award-winning author Tiffany D. Jackson and illustrator Reggie Brown is not to be missed.