No comments about Instant Cities.

No comments about Skycar City (MVRDV) (MVRDV) (MVRDV).

No comments about Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Questioning Cities Series).

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!

4 comments about The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.

1. New unreleased census data bears out what the author predicted 10 years ago:
   cities are revanchist and want to redevelop with the wealthy in mind. Thus
   there is a great emphasis on downtowns with tax subsidized housing for the
   above average household. Indeed, the modern city is best described as
   the revanchist city.



2. Everyone in New Orleans needs to read this book. A tad academic, it is, but his points are valid. Preservationists need to understand that decaying buildings are not historical or the 'fabric' of the community, they are blight. If money does not exist in the community, and if there is not interest from outside within a defind period of time (three years, I propose) then razing the building is acceptable. Vacancy and blight are just as bad an evil as yuppies moving in to bring Starbucks and Walmart (only the new, urban version of their stores) to the old 'hood. It is amoral to force the indiginous inhabitants to live in a blighted area just because it "used to be" a place of substance or have some historical standing. I mean this in the sense of social history as well as with historical events. New Orleans: "bring on the chains" because the city is not getting any better with the local citizenry doing there part, or lack thereof!



3. The most useful part of the book in terms of understanding cities is the chapter on the economic theory of gentrification, that economic incentives force landlords in a declining residential area to under-maintain their building, causing further deterioration of the neighborhood's housing stock until the buildings are so undercapitalized relative to the land value underneath that capital swooshes back in with rich people. (OK so this is kind of complicated for us non-economists but it's an important theory) The role of artists and the rhetoric of "urban pioneers" is very interesting too.

   The downside that I kept thinking about in later chapters is that it's a shame that left-wing authors' writing tends to be very academic in tone compared to those of establishment thinkers. The content in this book is interesting if you can get past that. If you just want a good left-wing view of cities, Mike Davis' City of Quartz is much a more crisply-written and compelling read.




4. I have to be careful when writing about the book that has become the backbone to my undergraduate dissertation. Smith goes where others have not dared by suggesting the real reasons behind change in New York and other western cities. His ideas are sound, but as with so many reactionary books I got the impression that he had decided on the answers before asking the questions. Research has little balance at all, and you begin to worry about its values when the book somehow manages to link revanchism to such wide ranging issues as "the organized murder of street kids in Rio de Janeiro, the Hindu massacres in Bombay, the pre-election slaughter of South Africans in Durban, the mayhem in Baghdad streets after the barbaric US bombing in 1991". However once he gets down from his socialist soapbox, the theories of revanchism can be useful for interperating change in western inner-cities. Not a book you will put down easily, but also one not to taken at face value...

   If you are interested in this subject check out M. Davis (1990) City of Quartz, H. Liggett & D. Perry (1995) Spatial Practices, and P. Knox (1992) The Restless Urban Landscape.

No comments about The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History).

2 comments about Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate.

1. An excellent overview of the evolving movement towards green development. The book is somewhat dated and lacks in-depth coverage in some areas. Regardless effectively gets you into the space.



2. This book throughly presents sustainable real estate development. It answers the basic questions of how, what, when, why and who with text and photos illustrating numerous case studies.

   It is written for a wide and concerned audience, composed of real estate professionals, financiers and designers. This book is not technical. It is a conceptual book and guides the reader toward sustainable solutions.

   This subject is very large and this book is necessarily a summary, which includes recent projects.

   This book does not "preach to the choir". It addresses difficult obstacles to the sustainable development paradigm and provides workable solutions.

3 comments about To Scale: One Hundred Urban Plans.

1. To Scale:... is a very good compare exhibition of 100 urban public spaces in many cities of all the world. The plans are a little simple in their representation and details but it is a very good begining for a urban form study.



2. To Scale is an excellent resource for urban design educators and students. The consistent graphic language and scale applied to the 100 plans is useful for drawing comparisons between different urban models and establishing a quick point of reference. The book offers a comprehensive coverage of urban typologies and illustrates fundamental concepts of urban design. I have already used this book to demonstrate to my students examples of: spatial sequences, connections, figural voids and alignments.
   
   As a course text, I would compliment it with other writings that talk about the cultural and theoretical context of the urban environment. This book is a great addition. Good work Jenkins!



3. This project is a very valuable idea but is spoiled by careless inaccuracies and missing information. The idea of comparing city figure-ground maps at the same scale is something of great interest to architects and urban designers. It is too bad that so many of the plans are filled with graphical errors, thereby casting doubt on many of the other drawings. Mr Jenkins writes in the introduction of the importance of going to original sources for accurate information and data, but clearly has not done so in many cases. For example the map of Bath in England shows the street running straight across the park in front of the Royal Crescent, when anyone who has ever studied this marvellous place knows that the road follows the oval shape of the buildings. The footprints of the buildings around the Royal Circus and Crescent by the Wood father and son are inaccurately drawn in relation to their depth, and most significantly, the property lines and garden walls are omitted from the drawings.
   This latter item is a consistent flaw in the whole book because the dimensions of the lot, or parcel lines are of enormous significance in understanding the scale and grain of an urban fabric. Knowing the dimensions of the individual parcel widths is a key to understanding the pattern of a city's building typologies and measuring facts such as residential density, for example.
   San Francisco North of Market blocks have a typical block dimension of 150 x 100 varas (Spanish land measurements) that translate into 412.5' x 275' with a 2:3 ratio of width to length. Portland Oregon has a 200' x 200' block dimension that is the smallest of any US city.
   If this book ever gets revised it would be valuable if all these drawings were corrected and verified.

1 comments about Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission.

1. This is a revised and updated reissue of the book that first appeared three decades ago. I have always been fascinated with the physical planning and development of the city where I was born (and again work in today)---and this is by far the best single history of that process over more than two centuries. Essentially focused on the work of the National Capital Planning Commission first formed in 1926, the study begins with the initial laying out of plots in the late 1790s, and then traces how the city has grown and changed in the decades since. Sometimes this development has been a matter of good planning, but almost as often that has not been the case. The overlapping concerns of local and federal government bodies (such as the older Commission of Fine Arts) is made clear, as is the central importance of both L'Enfant's original plan, and the 1901 McMillan Commission report that lay the ground for today's modern city. Well illustrated, this is a readable story of how the nation's capital city came to be the way it is.

2 comments about The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt.

1. Originally written as a PhD thesis in 1986, this book should have been published sooner than it was (1993) because it forewarns just where Jacques Derrida's elusive philosophy was taking us - to a ghost dance, specifically to Derrida's latest ill-fated attempt to prove the ethico-political relevance of his Deconstruction in his book, Specters of Marx, 1993. The Architecture of Deconstruction focuses on Derrida's essays on Husserl (Introduction to the Origin of Geometry) and on Abraham and Torok (Fors) rather than Derrida's essays on architecture (there are enough now to full a book, many concerning Plato's intriguing use of the word Chora, but in '86 there was only one published) in order, writes Wigley, "to think the covert architectural economy of his (Derrida's) work", thus, a poverty of resource is disguised as a guiding principle. Wigley had ample opportunity to correct this before publishing but he chose not to. The core of Wigley's thesis is that there exists an unspoken contract between architecture and philosophy. The former lends itself to the latter as a cluster of metaphors for stability (spatially systematised concepts inside built on solid foundations outside) and in return architectural discourse is granted the authority and respectability of higher learning that only philosophy can give. And like all good conspiracy theories this is a self-fulfilling prophesy: someone will inevitably contradict you, thereby proving the conspiracy is operative by attempting to cover it up. If anything, this book proves that conspiracy theories do indeed work, but when Deconstruction dances, its partner will always be a ghost.



2. Originally written as a PhD thesis in 1986, this book should have been published sooner than it was (1993) because it forewarns just were Jacques Derrida's elusive philosophy was taking us - to a ghost dance, specifically to Derrida's latest ill-fated attempt to prove the ethico-political relevance of his Deconstruction in his book, Specters of Marx, 1993. The Architecture of Deconstruction focuses on Derrida's essays on Husserl (Introduction to the Origin of Geometry) and on Abraham and Torok (Fors) rather than Derrida's essays on architecture (there are enough now to full a book, many concerning Plato's intriguing use of the word Chora, but in '86 there was only one published) in order, writes Wigley, "to think the covert architectural economy of his (Derrida's) work", thus, a poverty of resource is disguised as a guiding principle. Wigley had ample opportunity to correct this before publishing but he chose not to. The core of Wigley's thesis is that there exists an unspoken contract between architecture and philosophy. The former lends itself to the latter as a cluster of metaphors for stability (spatially systematised concepts inside built on solid foundations outside) and in return architectural discourse is granted the authority and respectability of higher learning that only philosophy can give. And like all good conspiracy theories this is a self-fulfilling prophesy: someone will inevitably contradict you, thereby proving the conspiracy is operative by attempting to cover it up. If anything, this book proves that conspiracy theories do indeed work, but when Deconstruction dances, its partner will always be a ghost.