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The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)
Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning ...[It] can also be seen in a much larger context   It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.  The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition..
Price: $12.75
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The Endless City
More and more people are moving into towns and cities to live and work, which is altering the urban/rural balance of countries worldwide. THE ENDLESS CITY is an unparalleled study of the growth of six of the world's international cities (New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin), exploring key structural, social, and economic factors. This book was overseen by the London School of Economics, and features extensive research and coherent texts by world-renowned professionals in the field of urban planning and development. The information is presented in a comprehensive and visually compelling sequence, enabling quick and efficient reference as well as offering material that is exciting to study. Each city is examined individually in its own chapter as well as being analyzed comparatively in an observational chapter. THE ENDLESS CITY is authoritatively edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic in collaboration with the London School of Economics and the Urban Age Project, an expanding international organization seeking a new urban agenda for global cities..
Price: $43.97
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The Image of the City
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..
Price: $15.74
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Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
A manifesto by America's most controversial and celebrated town planners, proposing an alternative model for community design. There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from a growing awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; the middle class, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day. Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in Suburban Nation they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. It is a lively, thorough, critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia-characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots-and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It is an indictment of the entire development community, including governments, for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is that rare book that also offers solutions. .
Price: $10.00
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Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age
Cars are the scourge of civilization, responsible for everything from suburban sprawl and urban decay to environmental devastation and rampant climate change - not to mention our slavish dependence on foreign oil from dubious sources. Add the astonishing price in human lives that we pay for our automobility - some thirty million people were killed in car accidents during the twentieth century - plus the countless number of hours we waste in gridlock commuting to work, running errands, picking up our kids, and searching for parking, and one can't help but ask: Haven't we had enough already? After a century behind the wheel, could we be reaching the end of the automotive age?From the Model T to the SUV, "Autophobia" reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new - in fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century now, ever since the automobile was invented. According to Brian Ladd, this love-hate relationship we have with our cars is the defining quality of the automotive age. And everyone has an opinion about them, from the industry shills, oil barons, and radical libertarians who offer cars blithe paeans and deny their ill effects, to the technophobes, treehuggers, and killjoys who curse cars, ignoring the very real freedoms and benefits they provide us. Focusing in particular on our world's cities, and spanning settings as varied as belle epoque Paris, Nazi Germany, postwar London, Los Angeles, New York, and Shanghai, Ladd explores this love-hate relationship throughout, acknowledging adherents and detractors of the automobile alike.Eisenhower, Hitler, Jan and Dean, J. G. Ballard, Ralph Nader, OPEC, and, of course, cars, all come into play in this wry and pithy book. A dazzling display of erudition, "Autophobia" is cultural commentary at its most compelling, history at its most searching - and a surprising page-turner..
Price: $11.25
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EcoCities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature
Most of the world's population now lives in cities. So if we are to address the problems of environmental deterioration and peak oil adequately, the city has to be a major focus of attention Ecocities is about re-building cities and towns based on ecological principles for the long term sustainability, cultural vitality and health of the Earth's biosphere. Unique in the literature is the book's insight that the form of the city really matters and that it is within our ability to change it, and crucial that we do. Further, that the ecocity within its bioregion is comprehensible and do-able, and can produce a healthy and potentially happy future. Ecocities describes the place of the city in evolution, nature and history. It pays special attention to the key question of accessibility and transportation, and outlines design principles for the ecocity. The reader is encouraged to plunge in to its economics and politics: the kinds of businesses, planning and leadership required. The book then outlines the tools by which a gradual transition to the ecocity could be accomplished. Throughout, this new edition is generously illustrated with the author's own inspired visions of what such rebuilt cities might actually look like. Richard Register is one of the world's great theorists and authors in ecological city design and planning. The founder of Urban Ecology and Ecocity Builders, he convened the first International Ecocity Conference in 1990, lectures around the world, and has authored two previous books, as well as an earlier edition of Ecocities. .
Price: $14.60
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Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature
Written by the chair of the LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) initiative, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature is both an urgent call to action and a comprehensive introduction to "sustainable urbanism"--the emerging and growing design reform movement that combines the creation and enhancement of walkable and diverse places with the need to build high-performance infrastructure and buildings. Providing a historic perspective on the standards and regulations that got us to where we are today in terms of urban lifestyle and attempts at reform, Douglas Farr makes a powerful case for sustainable urbanism, showing where we went wrong, and where we need to go. He then explains how to implement sustainable urbanism through leadership and communication in cities, communities, and neighborhoods. Essays written by Farr and others delve into such issues as: - Increasing sustainability through density.
- Integrating transportation and land use.
- Creating sustainable neighborhoods, including housing, car-free areas, locally-owned stores, walkable neighborhoods, and universal accessibility.
- The health and environmental benefits of linking humans to nature, including walk-to open spaces, neighborhood stormwater systems and waste treatment, and food production.
- High performance buildings and district energy systems.
Enriching the argument are in-depth case studies in sustainable urbanism, from BedZED in London, England and Newington in Sydney, Australia, to New Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California and Dongtan, Shanghai, China. An epilogue looks to the future of sustainable urbanism over the next 200 years.
At once solidly researched and passionately argued, Sustainable Urbanism is the ideal guidebook for urban designers, planners, and architects who are eager to make a positive impact on our--and our descendants'--buildings, cities, and lives..
Price: $54.37
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Home Delivery
As the world's population swells and the need for sustainable ways of living grows ever more urgent and obvious, prefabricated architecture has taken center stage. Even before our current predicaments, the mass-produced, factory-made home had a distinguished history, having served as a vital precept in the development of Modern architecture. Today, with the digital revolution reorganizing the relationship between drafting board and factory, it continues to spur innovative manufacturing and design, and its potential has clearly not yet come to fruition. Home Delivery traces the history of prefabrication in architecture, from its early roots in colonial cottages though the work of such figures as Jean Prouve and Buckminster Fuller, and mass-produced variants such as the Lustron house, to a group of full-scale contemporary houses commissioned specifically for the MoMA exhibition that this book accompanies. In addition to an introductory essay by Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator in the Museum's Department of Architecture and Design, this volume contains essays on prefabricated housing in Japan and in Nordic countries by Ken Tadashi Oshima and Rasmus Waern, respectively. It also includes focused texts on approximately 40 historical projects and five commissions, as well as a bibliography..
Price: $28.11
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The Landscape Urbanism Reader
With populations decentralizing and cities sprawling ever-outward, twenty-first- century urban planners are challenged by the need to organize not just people but space itself. Hence a new architectural discipline has emerged: landscape urbanism. In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim — long at the forefront of this new movement — has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field’s top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world — including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bélanger, Julia Czerniak, and more — capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners. .
Price: $17.60
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