Urbanity And Density

In the writing of urban design history of the twentieth century, functionalist and avant-garde models of the dissolution of the city are dominating. In contrast this book presents projects whose goal is the ideal of a dense and urbane city. Drawing on plans, built examples and theories of dense and urban cities and city districts in the twentieth century, modern examples of urban design are analyzed and highlighted, which until now have been evaluated more as fringe phenomena. These include examples characterized by functional mixture, social openness, spatially defined public spaces, urbanarchitecture, historical reference and a cultural understanding of the city. The book's new evaluation of modern urbandesign history creates opportunities for current planning by offering bestpractice models, which better reflect the striving for urbanity and density.

Having perceived a widespread failure of most community-scale plans, Eduardo Lozano has created a large and humane vision for community design, geared toward urban planners and designers, as well as those concerned with the communities of the future. Lozano strives to unify theory and practice, seeing that design at community scale is a relatively new responsibility for professionals and seeing the need for an awareness of the systemic nature of urban design. He also highlights relevant lessons from historical examples in order to rediscover the community design metier forgotten after the industrial revolution. The author relies on interdisciplinary studies, drawing from biology, ecology, and political science, as well as from history for his fascinating study. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the interrelationship of design and culture--society, technology, institutions, and values--and on the need for an agenda for political and cultural change.

City and Country traces the evolution of urban-rural systems 7,000 years ago into the modern global order and argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.

Growing Compact: Urban Form, Density and Sustainability explores and unravels the phenomena, links and benefits between density, compactness and the sustainability of cities. It looks at the socio-climatic implications of density and takes a more holistic approach to sustainable urbanism by understanding the correlations between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of the city, and the challenges and opportunities with density. The book presents contributions from internationally well-known scholars, thinkers and practitioners whose theoretical and practical works address city planning, urban and architectural design for density and sustainability at various levels, including challenges in building resilience against climate change and natural disasters, capacity and integration for growth and adaptability, ageing, community and security, vegetation, food production, compact resource systems and regeneration.

Contents: Introduction, History, Evolution and Development, People in Villages, Life in Rural Belts, The Infrastructure, Rural Economy, Agricultural Economy, Agricultural Projects, Farm Sector, Role of Education, Teaching Methods, Teaching Approaches, Teaching Techniques, Pace of Progress, New of Progress, New Trends, Social Revolution.

The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive wave of present urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities. This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery – suburbanization – and the ways of life – suburbanisms – we encounter there. Richly detailed with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor, and many built forms and ways of life in-between. The reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from the outside in.

Questioning the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside and wilderness, this issue of AD explores emergent types of public space in low-density environments. It describes this new form of urbanism: decentralised, in a constant process of expansion and contraction, not homogenous or necessarily low-rise, nor guided by one mode of development, typology or pattern. While functionally and programmatically dispersed, settlements operate as a form of urbanism; the place of collective spaces within them has yet to be defined and articulated. The physical transformation of the built environment on the one hand, and the change in our notion of the public on the other - due to globalisation, privatisation and segregation - call for renewed interpretations of the nature and character of public space. The concept of public space needs to be examined: replaced, re-created or adapted to fit these conditions. What is the place of the public in this form of urbanism, and how can architecture address the notion of common, collective spaces? What is the current sociopolitical role o such spaces? How does the form and use of these spaces reflect the conception of the public as a political (or non-political) body? And can architecture regain an active role in formulating the notion of the collective? These and other issues are addressed through essays, research projects and built work by distinguished writers such as Bruce Robbins, Albert Pope and Alex Wall, and Practitioners including Zvi Hecker, Vito Acconci, MUTOPIA, Manuel de Sola-Morales, Martha Rosler and Manuel Vicente in a search for new collective architectures within the dispersed city.

In this basic textbook, prospective architects, urban and landscape planners receive assistance in working on urban development projects and designs. This edition has been expanded by two chapters on informal urban planning and regional urban development. The contents presented and their preparation are based on the design process in practice and embed it in a theoretical framework of necessary background knowledge. As an introduction, an overview of the understanding of the city, of urban structures and the laws governing them is given. In order to make the multi-layered structure of the city more comprehensible, it is broken down into different layers and building blocks. The approach to urban design is described using the "layer method" in the form of successive phases. Examples of urban development projects and competitions illustrate the individual design steps.