1 comments about Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities.

1. Here we have a very interesting investigation about the stories of the american cities and specially its downtowns, how they have growned, its shinning past and its following falldown. We can learn about very brilliant redevelopment projects that are intending to rebuild and to regain once again progress and live to some parts of the modern cities that have been in a great depression since long decades of desinvestments. It is very important to take in accounts the stories very well written by the authors about how the joining between public and privates forces is the only way to rebulit american ( and everywhere) abandoned downtowns!

5 comments about The New City Home: Smart Design for Metro Living.

1. Need some ideas for your loft apartment? This book is full of great decorating plans you can put into action.



2. After moving into our new loft in the Pearl District I realized it needed a new "do". It didn't feel right until I did alot of research and made major changes. The New City Home, coupled with a few others fueled the idea bank we now have the place we feel is really US. Nice presentation and beat the expense of an interior designer. After living in the burbs for so long, we feel like we're on vacation everyday.



3. My dream is to own a loft one day and I have been to open house tours and read many books about this subject. I have a very defined taste, concerning how I want a loft to look and how I want to decorate my loft. I have a very contemporary taste in furnishings and I like an open and airy loft. When I first received this book in the mail, I almost quit breathing. It was if the authors had looked into my dreams and thoughts to create this book. This book truly represents the contemporary feel and look that I like so well. I can guarantee you that if you are interested in a contemporary look to your loft, this is your book. I know that I will probably wear this book out, because it is truly an inspirational vision of a modern loft. The photos are beautifully done, the writing is sharp and concise, and the overall quality is outstanding!!



4. Young people today aren't keeping to the small-town or suburban lifestyles of their parents. They're going to the cities to rent studio apartments. Once there, they're likely to end up moving into family-size spaces.

   City planners and administrators are taking this back-to-the-cities trend into consideration. They're trying to make city living appeal to young future owners. One way is by business building up a neighborhood around it, in brownstones; floor-through flats; high-rise apartments; lofts; offbeat converted places such as autoshops and stables; rowhouses; and townhouses.

   Likewise, architects are thinking about the loss of peace, privacy and quiet that usually comes with city living. They're coming up with designs that meet young needs for shelter and express young personalities. The result really is personal space inside, even with such impersonal space outside as "shadowy" concrete buildings.

   This is done by clearly-defined lines, hand-worked materials, soothing planes, and unusual details indoors. It's also by putting in balconies and terraces and opening up roofs and windows to light and views onto deliberately planted small, green spaces. Similarly, not much space inside looks bigger, for example, by using the same materials in and out, such as cedar flooring, fencing and decking.

   THE NEW CITY HOME even brings working spaces inside, while keeping them attractively and cleverly separate from living spaces. In one case, for example, the outside has cottage-style clapboard cladding for the first floor. Indoors, the kitchen and living spaces have a cozy look, what with simple cabinetry, low ceilings and boldly painted colors. The second floor has plywood panels on the outside. Inside, spotlights, skylights, and high ceilings show the upper level to be for work.

   What if the two can't always be separated, as in bathrooms or kitchens? Space isn't clearly personal or work, if it brings in universal design. This means, for example, lever handles to doors and faucets, rocker-panel light switches, and textured non-slip flooring.

   Leslie Plummer Clagett's book is organized and written in an understandable, user-friendly way. Her choice of illustrations works perfectly with what she says. This practical help to city living is rounded out with Elizabeth Franklin's THE FRANKLIN REPORT, NEW YORK CITY 2003: THE INSIDER'S GUIDE TO HOME SERVICES.




5. I've browsed about twenty different contemporary interior books, and I've found this to be most interesting and slightly more inspiring.

   One piece of advice: I don't think any of the contemporary interior books have as much variety as one might expect. Make sure to browse the physical books before making a final decision - don't base you decision on these reviews alone. I've done this with many book on interior design and I've been disappointed.

No comments about To Scale: One Hundred Urban Plans.

5 comments about Building Big.

1. This book is outstanding! It's informative, yet easy to read. I have used it as the textbook for my high school engineering class for two years, and the students love it!



2. I bought this book for my 6 year old son who is an avid builder. I knew that the text would be above his head, so I read the book before giving it to him so I could summarize the paragraphs for him. He asks to look at this book every night and loves it. This is not a picture book as it has a lot of text, but the pictures are well done, and he has gained some basic building concepts that he uses with his Legos and blocks. He likes to look at the book about how they build a structure (he is really fascinated by the Hoover dam and Petronas Towers) and they we look online at the completed pictures. It's a great book for older children (or if you want to take the time with a younger child to explain it) and I recommend it.



3. I gave this book as a gift to someone who loves and understands architecture. He found it most interesting. It contains many facts that are not generally know about large, historical structures.



4. David Macaulay takes the reader on a tour of some of the really big civil engineering structures of our time. Building Big has sections on Bridges, Tunnels, Dams, Domes, and Skyscrapers. Each part of the book describes the design and construction of from four to ten outstanding examples of the structure highlighted. The examples in each category are described in chronological order with some going back to the time of ancient Rome. The drawings that accompany the text are excellent at focusing on the details and techniques described. The integration of text and graphics is wonderful. In each case, Macaulay describes the design objectives, the interplay between the structure and the environment, and the engineering solutions used to bring the structures into being. This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in structural engineering and design. I have not seen the related PBS video series, but I can say that the book stands on its own very well. Highly recommended.



5. Macaulay fans are going to be amazed and impressed by this, his best book yet. It's a companion to the PBS series that's better than the films! A must see and better yet, must buy.

1 comments about Blueprint Remodel: Tract Home Transformations That Turn Everyday to Extraordinary.

1. For tract home transformations which turn an ordinary tract model into something special, the adventurous homeowner should consult Michelle Kodis' Blueprint Remodel: Tract Home Transformations That Turn Everyday To Extraordinary which is packed with color photos of both interior and exteriors. Blueprint Remodel includes remodel costs of each project, remodel observations and intentions, blueprints, and notes on special approaches which translated to savings.

1 comments about The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality (The American Moment).

1. This book went through each decade and described how the times effected the development of the American City. There were numerous examples that painted a clear picture of what it was like to live during the time of prohibition, the depression, or the suburbanization of the 60's. Teaford makes the usually boring subject of history enjoyable!

2 comments about The Community Planning Handbook: How People Can Shape Their Cities, Towns and Villages in Any Part of the World.

1. This book is the A-Z of community lead local planning. It includes 200 pages of concise and clearly explained principles, methods, example scenarios, forms, check lists, a glossary, contacts and other incredibly useful how-to resources. This manual is very useful for urban planning consultants, progressive municipal authorities and communities leaders that want to ensure the voice of the people who will be affected by local construction are part of the decision making process. Nick Wates writes from a perspective of real world experience with lots of practical tips for situations that vary from ideal community owned projects to last minute public consultation in a traditional city planing process.
   
   "The Community Planning Handbook" is designed to be easily searched for ideas and practical direction in planning and organizing events, managing processes and establishing organizations to involve and empower citizens to give informed direction to the designs and implementation of changes to the architecture in their communities. The text is written from a UK perspective although there is considerable effort made to include photos and context from other nations, especially from rural villages in places like China, India, Fiji, Kenya and the Philippines. Jeremy Brook's graphical design is very user friendly with hundreds of illustrative photos, diagrams, time lines and information boxes.
   
   Although "The Community Planning Handbook" is written within a limited scope of physical planning and design for villages, towns and cities, many of the principles, methods and suggestions are still applicable to other situations of participatory planning, such as public policy and organizational change. If you want to help manage organization and community efforts that are bottom-up, buy this book and keep it on your desk.



2. This book offers lots of general principles, methods and scenarios to help people who are interested in community planning as soon as possible to get involved. It also makes links between those principles, methods and scenarios with each other in order to make them more useful and easy to apply. The last part-appendices can combine all those above mention to a practice situation. This is a very useful handbook, in my personal opinion.

No comments about Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology.

No comments about Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

5 comments about Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence.

1. This book presents a right track of understanding and solving the problems of today cities.



2. This excellent book will give you the insight to understand how transportation and cities interact.



3. This book has provided a clear insight on sustainable transport strategies and policies which have been adopted in different countries. It is very well explained and I must say that it is the best piece the authors have actually written. It amalgamates the previous work carried out by the authors and therefore is an excellent reference book, which should be present in every transport planner's shelf and in every university.



4. In "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" written in the 1960s Jane Jacobs embraced complexity as a goal in itself. "How" she asked "can cities generate enough mixture among uses, enough diversity throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilisation?" For Newman and Kenworthy the key idea is sustainability - "one of the most diversely applied concepts among academics and professionals discussing the future..." that "...has cut across all disciplines and professions and has developed many complexities." The car enters Newman and Kenworthy's consideration as a technology of widening individual choice. Why then is the car not the transport technology, par excellence? What unintended consequence has meant its proliferation has blighted the very thing it might have been expected to nurture?

   Newman and Kenworthy argue that the car, unlike public transport, offered people who could afford it freedom to live anywhere in a city and get quickly to any other part of it. It appeared to remove the need to plan land-use. Anything could be built anywhere with drivers determining their own routes to and from home to work, shops, schools and entertainment. In the "car-city" - which Newman and Kenworthy distinguish from the "pedestrian city" and the "transit city" - it is possible to develop in any direction and not just along rivers, tramlines or railways. Dispersed low density housing becomes accessible and popular. Town planners can separate residential from industrial zones accelerating decentralisation. Public and commercial buildings no longer need to cluster as a product of the convergence of private and public investment in a particular place. Public transport constricted by timetables and fixed routes becomes second class travel.

   Where the car city has been taken to extremes as in Newman and Kenworthy's intellectual territory - America and Australia - the penny dropped soonest. The social consequences that attended driving people off streets and creating boundaries round parks, squares, promenades, pavements - which had served as milieu for human interaction - only began to be widely accepted quite recently. Only now is a wedge of new economic logic being driven between the car and its enduring connection with the good life.

   The car, once it ceased to be an indulgence of the rich, always represented a balance between liberation and dependency. Today, the choices promised by cars are linked transparently to those they take away. Everyone knows about exhaust emissions and most drivers, outside of advertisements, experience worsening road conditions. There is growing despondency among those who would like to use their cars less. They realise alternatives won't work unless people switch in large numbers to other ways of getting around. But the public space needed to take to the streets to walk or cycle and take trains and buses is unavailable. Many see public space as hazardous for themselves, and perilous for their children. Deprivations long imposed on people without cars apply, with increasing force, to people with them. New technology may reduce vehicle emissions. It cannot recover the enormous interaction space taken out of circulation by road traffic. Before that lost social space can become available for people outside cars, a legal and moral space has to be reclaimed.

   This is why the idea of sustainability is slowly and surely turning into a value. It is the big idea which legitimates unpopular regulation. It offers space for the entrepreneurs of the future, exciting third world policy makers who want to leap a stage in the industrial revolutions of the richer nations. It is the idea around which people are ready to form alliances that go beyond their interests; a concept which "did not come so much from academic discussion as from a global political process." Newman and Kenworthy speak of their book being "many years in preparation", a book that is a "combination of text book and life story" deriving from work with city governments and voluntary groups attempting to address a major global and local issue of how people "can simultaneously reduce their impact on earth while improving their quality of life".

   This books aims to show how a city's use of land determines and is determined by its dominant forms of transport. It describes how policies aimed at creating sustainable relationships between humans and their environment necessarily revolve around a city's land-use-transport formula. Getting this right is a prerequisite for urban renaissance.

   What makes this book of especial value and its focus provocative is that so many cities and towns are now "auto-dependent". Because cars are sold on the basis of the freedoms they offer, policies to regulate so dominant a form of transport, even when those freedoms are nurtured in the imagination rather than available in the material world, arouse strong protest. Attempts to diversify people's transport choices are regularly characterised as restrictive and even oppressive. Instead of being seen as a catalyst for wealth production, governments addressing challenges to the reputation and wealth of cities caused by "auto-dependence" are seen as depriving large numbers of citizens of fundamental freedoms. The "motorist" has become a late 20th century everyman, affected from all angles by policies to restore a balance in cities between space allocated to rapid movement and space where citizens can engage in civil exchange.

   This book is a mine of arguments, backed by statistics, illustrations and graphs. Readers concerned about global warming may be disappointed to find no thinking about the impact of air transport on the sustainability of cities. Officials and politicians thinking of purchasing this text may ask whether it arrays anti-car prejudices against a "normal paradigm" of improving cars and roads and a friendlier planning regime for building of homes and businesses on green field sites. For Newman and Kenworthy that argument is over. Their book is primarily for those who seek to understand the implications of a paradigm which doesn't treat gridlocks or bypasses as the only options.




5. A must-read for city planners, environmentalists, urban policymakers, and all those generally concerned with "smart growth," sustainability and a vision for the 21st century. Newman and Kenworthy make a clear case for the rethinking of our current pattern of development and why it just doesn't make sense. They offer an alternative pattern that is not only achievable, but attractive. Their study of global cities throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia is clear and conclusive. And their vision is inspiring. American cities are making their comeback based on many of the principles expressed here. Read this book and share it with all those you know!