No comments about New Civic Art : Elements of Town Planning.

No comments about SANAA Houses: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa.

No comments about Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005 (Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation).

No comments about Mixed-Use Development Handbook (Development Handbook series).

No comments about Land Development, 10th Edition.

1 comments about Inquiry by Design: Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience in Architecture, Interiors, Landscape, and Planning, Updated and Revised Edition.

1. I read the book about a year ago but forgot to review it promptly. For this review I've looked back at my highlights to refresh my memory and my review may not be as good as it could have been. Sorry.
   
   The book used actual research results from a variety of studies to support the hypothesis that architecture and interior design can dramatically improve occupant's well-being. We respond neurologically, psychologically, and physiologically to our environments, and that designers can craft interiors that improve our well-being, including health and longevity.
   
   The book includes a section on observing environmental behavior that gives designers a jump start on the practical application of ethnographic research for interior activities.
   
   I didn't get as much information from this book as I had hoped. That isn't necessarily the author's fault though. The main problem is that the depth of research we need for understanding how to design architecture and interiors for human well-being is limited by both funding and researcher's imaginations. This is probably about the best the book could be written at this time in history.
   
   I would love to recommend this book to all architects and interior designers but I know many and they would never have the patience or interest to get through it. However, there is a small tribe of designers who realize that both professions are sadly lacking in understanding humans in interior environments. If you are in that tribe then this book is a must read. You will help change the world.
   
   - jim

5 comments about Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods.

1. Although I haven't purchased this book, I have read a copy that I borrowed from a library.
   
   This is a very practical book. It is nice to know that there is a way in which suburbanites can become less car-dependent, and that you don't have to live in a city's downtown core to become less car-dependent! I also like the idea of suburbs becoming more like traditional towns surrounding each big city. If suburbs were like traditional towns, they would be much more pleasant and more interesting places to live in.



2. "Researchers have demonstrated that a feeling of community reduces suburban depression."
   
   The first pictures I observed upon opening this book were of a lovely neighborhood in much need of comfort and the beautiful results after the streets had been lined with trees. Sidewalks had also been created and pathways up to each front porch created a very inviting environment. The trees shaded the walkways and people enjoyed riding their bikes down the streets. The contrast was eye opening and the results very comforting. You can imagine the people living in this area finally feeling like they were home.
   
   The contents include:
   
   The Changing Face of Suburbia
   Reinventing Our Neighborhoods for Health, Profit, and Community
   Imagining a Sustainable Neighborhood
   How to Remodel a Neighborhood
   Germination: First Steps
   Leafing Out: Bolder Ideas
   Your Neighborhood Blossoms: Boldest Steps
   Suburban Revitalization I: Can This Dream Become a Reality?
   Suburban Revitalization II: Making Bold Dreams Come True
   Taking Care in the Neighborhood
   
   This book helps to emphasize the isolation of the typical suburban house and shows how the community design seems to emphasize private space instead of community. This promotes a lack of connection. Could the way we live promote depression and a lack of friendships? Could the way we build communities lessen domestic violence, encourage community interaction and promote a general feeling of well-being?
   
   Like Feng Shui, this book gives ideas for building or restoring neighborhoods to promote happiness and to reduce stress. While some say we are not a product of our environment, it only takes a little research to find out that where there is more hope and a greater sense of community, humans seem to thrive.
   
   "...research reveals that in a closely knit community, levels of serotonin (a natural anti-depressant) are higher, so the neighborhood is collectively more optimistic and energetic." ~pg. 26
   
   The transformations in communities is revealed in pictures that explore the role of nature in our comfort level. Would you rather live behind high brick walls or enjoy a more peaceful and serene landscape of short fences and flowered walkways? In one section, an alleyway between living spaces is transformed into a little piece of heaven.
   
   Some of the features include:
   
   Ten Basic Design Principles for Remodeling Neighborhoods
   How to Sponsor Community Dinners
   Neighborhood Clubs
   Organic Gardens
   Replacing asphalt with porous pavers - to reduce heat absorption
   
   As a child, I remember two types of homes. One with a backyard, tightly fenced in, and another with wide-open spaces and easy access to walking through community spaces. I can tell you, I preferred the latter.
   
   This book is filled with wisdom and great advice for city planners and I've seen the idea of producing an edible landscape work efficiently in some areas. As a child we used to pick fruit off trees on the walk home from school. It is a dream that can come true and this book has many ideas that once implemented will improve the lives of everyone in the community. By reading this book, you may also decide to move to a location that values these ideas.
   
   ~The Rebecca Review
   Currently living in an area without fences and lovely tree-lined walkways



3. Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods is a "self-help" book for urban and suburban neighborhoods. The suburbs are often car-dependent, land-hungry, strictly residential neighborhoods that are often isolated from schools, workplaces and civic centers. They often lack convenient links to parks and mass transportation and are typically not developed in ways conducive to meeting people.

   But, these challenges provide numerous opportunities for positive change! People can reinvent their neighborhoods based on economic, environmental, and social values. Superbia! provides a checklist of Easy, Bolder, and Boldest Steps that can lead to safer, friendlier, livelier, healthier, more productive, diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. Neighbors can chose the steps they think will create a stronger sense of place and connection to people, nature, and culture.

   Easy Steps include sponsoring community dinners, establishing a community newsletter, and creating car and van pools for work commutes. Some neighbors have started book and investment clubs. For example, the Hillcrest Neighborhood Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sponsors a book club where neighbors "get together with fellow book enthusiasts to converse, discuss, and debate current bestsellers and classics," according to the group's website. Superbia! describes how there are hundreds of potential links between people within neighborhoods - links that can reduce time, human energy, and money spent by individuals on tight schedules as well as tight budgets. Easy Steps help people know one another better helping them discover links that lead to Bolder Steps.

   Planting a community garden or orchard is a Bolder Step. A composting project can serve the community garden and individual yards. Planting shade trees and windbreaks reduces energy costs, provides wildlife habitat, and increases property values. The Highlands Neighborhood in Littleton, Colorado, took a Bolder Step by tearing down fences. There was already a neighborhood tradition of parties in backyards, but neighbors decided to go a step further and took down their six-foot fences and opened the space to the neighbors creating a better sense of community.

   Boldest Steps include creating a community energy system and creating a common house and community-shared office. A Boldest Step was taken by New York's Darrow School when the failure of a conventional wastewater system provided an opportunity to install a Living Machine - a greenhouse-contained biological waste treatment facility that uses natural methods rather than harmful chemicals to recycle human waste. This system is also used as a hands-on laboratory for a variety of classes including science, chemistry, mathematics, and even art.

   With a history of how the suburbs came to be, 31 ways to make the suburbs better, examples of people who have created more sustainable neighborhoods, and a Resource Guide, readers can actively transform their suburbia into Superbia!

   Authors Chiras and Wann walk their talk. Chiras built and lives in a sustainable, solar home, and Dave Wann helped develop and lives in Harmony Village co-housing. They are also co-directors of the Sustainable Futures Society's Sustainable Suburbs project. Visit www.sustainablecolorado.org to learn more.

   Susan Bilo is an energy and resource conservation consultant with Sustainable By Design, LLC.




4. To inject life, fun and spontanaeity into North American suburbs will not be easy. Many neighbourhoods were built after WW II, when land and resources such as electricity and gasoline were plentiful and cheap; developers, government and the public were not very conscious of there being limits to, or issues with, creating vast car-centric suburbs. Now, many of us live in an energy-inefficient home on a long, straight street that forms one line in a grid that is populated by far more motor vehicles than pedestrians. Here, we easily grow fat and sedentary, often not knowing who lives one or two doors away.
   In Superbia!, the authors prescribe 31 steps to transform neighborhoods into places where there is a true sense of community, and where hard resources (e.g. cars, washing machines) can ultimately be shared by groups of families, and consumable resources (electricity, gasoline) are used in more environmentally responsible ways.
   The encouraging news is that neighborhoods in the USA, Europe and elsewhere have implemented these 31 steps. It often took a lot of persuasion of local politicians and bureaucrats to, for example, tear up existing streets to make them narrower, for the purpose of calming traffic. While the authors, to their credit, indicate that some of the 31 steps are plainly challenging to implement, and ential people changing their mental models, the authors at times neglect to address the role and response of some key stakeholders as neighborhoods transform themselves. For example, as I read the steps about removing fences between people's yards, and subsequent encouragement of kids in the neighborhood to congregate in certain areas of this newly-created 'open' space, I visualized the trepidation that the insurance companies covering these homes might have; what happens when you encourage everyone onto your property, and then someone gets hurt? In general terms, I felt that the book could at times have been more rigorous in tipping off the reader as to what to expect from other stakeholders relevant to the transformation process.
   I support what the authors propose. The main message I got from the book is: don't wait for politicians or developers to be the ones to build or retrofit neighborhoods that are environmentally sustainable, and offer building structures and juxtapositions to foster social cohesiveness; rather, strike out on your own, with the modest first step being to organize a potluck supper for your immediate neighbors. From there, transformation events can evolve; the authors have demonstrated, through numerous anecdotes, that this process can indeed work.



5. Superbia! is a strikingly simple book, proposing that neighbors can create
   friendlier and healthier neighborhoods by getting to know each other and
   working together. The beginning Steps it suggests are easy - things like
   having neighborhood potlucks and baby-sitting coops - but the advanced steps
   will take some real teamwork. You and your neighbors won't set up a
   neighborhood energy system or buy a house for use as a common building until
   a high level of trust is established. By the time the advanced steps are
   taken on, the neighborhood will be like an extended family, with all its
   benefits -- as well as liabilities.

   But Chiras and Wann argue that the benefits far outweigh the liabilities.
   For example, they don't propose a loss of privacy, but rather an increase in
   options and flexibility. What do we do when the car won't start, we go on
   vacation and the plants need watering, or we just need someone to talk to?
   Call a neighbor.

   This book is well-researched, documenting how neighborhoods took the shape
   they did, with wide streets, huge lawns, and barricade-like garage doors.
   The 50 million suburban homes in the U.S. (and all their associated
   infrastructure) are then seen in the book as ingredients for cooking up a
   better neighborhood. As the authors suggest, why can't we create common
   areas for the kids and a community garden by donating parcels of our
   backyards and creating a pathway where alleys used to be? Why can't we
   establish a neighborhood recycling system, a carpooling and even car-sharing
   system? Why shouldn't part of our yards also become low-maintenance, "edible
   landscapes" that provide cherries and grapes rather than just grass
   clippings?

   As the book compellingly asks, Why can't we work together to save time,
   money, and human energy, and in the process, have some fun? In the median
   income U.S. household budget, $3,000 a year could be saved if our costs for
   food, energy, entertainment, health, and transportation were reduced through
   neighborhood efforts that also meet an often- expressed need for a sense of
   community, and a sense of place.

   What Superbia! is about is basic improvements in the quality of our
   lifestyles. Less of an emphasis on buying our lives, and more on just living
   our lives. Far from being just a Utopia-like dream, the book's ideas are
   already being implemented in neighborhoods across the country, and several
   chapters in the book are dedicated to case studies of each Step - where and
   how it was implemented. Another series of chapters presents a fictitious
   neighborhood that walks the reader through the evolution of the Fox Run
   neighborhood, from suburbia to Superbia!

   If your neighborhood association needs a spark of energy, get a copy of this
   book and form a discussion group around it. At the very least, you'll
   emerge with a roster of neighbors and a fresh perspective on what a
   neighborhood can be.

3 comments about Housing Policy in the United States: An Introduction.

1. Purchased the book for a class . . . seems to be a good book that provides a cursory overview of residential housing policy in the US.



2. If you're searching for an introductory one-volume treatment of this subject that is also well written and researched, you'd be hard-pressed to top this book. That's not to say that I don't have quibbles; the book could have contained more critical insight and still would have worked fine as an introductory level text.
   
   For example both the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and the public housing chapters (chapters 5 and 6) seem to take the inherent value of "deconcentration" and "mixed income" at face value, at a time when both notions are finally beginning to receive long overdue critical attention from social scientists (besides William Julius Wilson), not just planners, pundits, and politicians. It turns out that these notions are highly problematic in their actual application. As Edward Goetz and others have pointed out about the HOPE VI program for instance, "the program is not so much about improving the conditions for previous residents as it is about reclaiming urban neighborhoods for middle- income families." This is a stronger statement than Schwartz makes on p. 118 of the book where he observes instead that the program "does not necessarily improve the lives of all the residents of the original public housing."
   
   It is also neither fair nor balanced for Schwartz to neglect to mention that the 1937 U.S. Housing Act, as one of its many compromises, ITSELF required segregated housing projects (in the book he suggests that segregated public housing was more of a local phenomenon). He also overemphasizes the role of elected officials in Black neighborhoods who he says did not want integrated housing because it would have affected their political base. Does he mean to honestly suggest that the black desire to hold on to what limited political power it possessed during the Jim Crow 1930's is somehow to blame as much for segregated public housing in America as the actions of people such as Rep. Henry Steagall (the House sponsor of the bill) of Alabama? Schwartz's simple and direct discussion of racism in the FHA earlier in the book is better and more honest.
   
   Then there's the simple but honest critical question that Schwartz doesn't really tackle: at a time of record profits in the secondary mortgage market (discussed in pages 56-62), how is it that housing affordability problems continue to exist and in some cases even worsen in city after American city?
   
   On the plus side, the fair housing chapter (chapter 11) is excellent, as is the "stubborn facts of housing policy" section of the last chapter. Also, Schwartz's summary of HUD's programs for the homeless and disabled is one of the most concise I have read.
   
   In the end my nitpicks do not detract from the fact that Schwartz has written the most accessible and comprehensive introductory text on American housing policy out there. By explaining the often byzantine laws and rules governing housing finance, he has performed a much-needed public service. And by clarifying why housing matters (and will continue to matter) in the way that he does, he is positively contributing to a growing and much needed debate.



3. Professor Schwartz has written simply the most complete book on public housing available today. It's easy to follow, and covers every aspect of the public policy and finance behind the shaping of our urban landscape. This is not only an excellent classroom text, but useful for anyone interested in learning more about the growth -- and possible decay -- of our great American cities.

5 comments about Mutations.

1. This ridiculous book is nothing more and nothing less than a sad example of the disdain these authors feel for the world at large and for their poor readers in particular. Riddled with typos, filled with pictures of the poorest quality and utterly devoid of any original ideas, the book falls back, again and again, on worn, political cliches and pompous, unnecessarily complex phrasings that serve only one purpose: to conceal the fact that there is absolutely nothing of worth or merit being said here (beyond the incredibly, utterly astounding insight that cities, third world cities especially, are growing pretty darn fast!) At certain points it seems that even the writers can't follow their own ramblings. One particularly confused contributor (McKenzie Wark) writes " . . . technologies enclose, they count and rank what they enclose." Then, four sentences later, he/she writes: "Technologies do not enframe. There's no enclosure . . ." And that is about as coherent as that writer gets. One can only conclude that these people never expected anyone to actually read their book, since they obviously didn't take the time to read it themselves. Thank you Rem Koolhaas and your band of incompetent contributors for wasting my time and money on this utter disgrace of a book.



2. this book is packed with info. some of it is relatively hard to get at (your eyes are likely to glaze over at the reams of essays formatted in a narrow, sans-serif OCR-esque font) but the content and data is pretty good. it looks very nice in your bookshelf, but when hitting it up for a re-read, you may find yourself cursing the designers' decisions to go with form over function, IMHO.



3. This book is to be considered a piece of historical evidence of the tendencies of thought of the new era. Whether you may find the concepts proposed not suitable, every prospective or practicing architect, designer or urban planner must be aware of the latest tendencies of thought in order to be the best-educated he/she can be.

   The Pearl River Delta investigation is impecable. For the "reasonably intelligent person" that wrote a comment above, it is a shame that you overlooked the whole analysis on shopping, perhaps because you are so immersed in it in the USA that you cannot see the forest for the trees.

   I agree that the language is dense and often martian-like. This is the case of the introductory essay "Telegram from nowhere". But read between the lines. Reading is re-reading said Joyce. You will find a very smart concept regarding the architecture built for the media.

   This book is all about cities in different parts in the world. It helps a lot if you are a culturally aware person. If you have had contact with diverse forms of living and thinking, may I highly suggest you get hold of this book. If you are not, you may either feel that the text is just wobbling on things you cannot be empathic with, or you may be on your way to becoming a more educated human being. And do not think by any means that this is a meek and mild pro-globalization text. This book is just rasing questions and proposing concepts, like all masterpiece limit themselves to do.




4. This book was a required textbook for an urban planning class I took at college. I was very disappointed with the book overall. The photographs were very nice, but the text was utterly confusing, and difficult to follow. I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person, but I could not grasp most of what the authors were trying to say. The only parts of the book I enjoyed was the sections on the United States, which covered urban sprawl, gangs in cities, generic, look-alike architecture, etc. The rest of the book left much to be desired. The other students in my urban planning class agreed with my opinion of the book. Nobody seemed to get much use out of it except for the professor.



5. I bought this book because of the Pearl River Delta Study. For me who actually grew up in that part of the world I wanted to see how these "foreigners" look at my home town. It gave me new insights on how to look at cities... in a different way.. in different eyes. To me it is valuable at least in this sense.

2 comments about Time-Saver Standards Site Construction Details Manual.

1. This is a great book that I use all the time in my design work. It's organized really well making it very easy to use. Like Gang Chen mentioned in his review, you can't just copy and apply each detail as is, you have to adapt it to your specific climate and design program. That said, the details are a great starting point. I recommend this book to not only landscape architects working in large LA firms, but also to the residential designers who incorporate a lot of detailing in their plans.



2. Detailing is difficult for young design professionals. College education does not cover enough detail design, the only ways to learn how to develop details are: 1) learn through working experience in design offices; 2) teach yourself by reading good books.
   
   "Time-Saver Standards Site Construction Details Manual" can alleviate this problem. When they wrote this book, Nicholas T. Dines, FASLA was a professor and director for the graduate MLA program at the University of Massachusetts, and already had 32 years of professional experience. Kyle Brown was an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, and held a Bachelor and a Master degree in Landscape Architecture and was a Ph. D candidate in regional planning.
   
   "Time-Saver Standards Site Construction Details Manual" covers athletic surfaces (natural and artificial turf, athletic paving), curbs (asphalt, brick, wood, stone and concrete curbs), drainage inlets (catch basins, area drains, trench drains), drainage swales (concrete, stone and vegetated swales), lighting (accent, pedestrian and vehicular lighting), paving (aggregate, asphalt, brick, concrete, stone, wood and synthetic paving, reinforce turf), paving dividers (brick, concrete and stone paving dividers), paving edges, paving joints, pedestrian ramps, planting, ponds, retaining structures, seatwalls, steps, and walls. There is also a useful detail index at the end.
   
   The details in this book are useful, but you still have to adapt them per your specific project condition. For example, some of the paving details call for "reinforcement as required." If you just copy and use these details, I guarantee you'll get change orders for your job. You should adapt these details per the soils report and tenant or developer criteria of your job and / or consult your structural engineer to actually specify what kind of reinforcement you are using for these details in your job.
   
   "Time-Saver Standards Site Construction Details Manual" has 416 pages and 350 common site details. It is a good Site Construction reference book for architects, landscape architects and engineers. Like any other books, it'll not cover every situation for your job. As a design professional, you should still review and adapt these details for your job.