Why are so many of our urban environments so resistant to change? The author tackles this question in her comprehensive guide for planners, designers, and students concerned with how cities take shape. This book provides a fundamental understanding of how physical environments are created, changed, and transformed through ordinary processes over time. Most of the built environment adheres to a few physical patterns, or types, that occur over and over. Planners and architects, consciously and unconsciously, refer to building types as they work through urban design problems and regulations. Suitable for professional planners, architects, urban designers, and students, This book includes practical examples of how typology is critical to analytical, design, and regulatory situations.

An illustrated history of the American city's evolution from sparsely populated village to regional metropolis. American Urban Form—the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life—has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes and wires, wharves, railroads, highways, and airports reflect changing patterns of the social, political, and economic processes that shape the city. In this book, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore map more than three hundred years of the American city through the evolution of urban form. They do this by offering an illustrated history of “the City”—a hypothetical city (constructed from the histories of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York) that exemplifies the American city's transformation from village to regional metropolis. In an engaging text accompanied by Whittemore's detailed, meticulous drawings, they chart the City's changes. Planning for the future of cities, they remind us, requires an understanding of the forces that shaped the city's past.

This is a book about cities or, more precisely, about the physical form of cities. It starts presenting the main elements of urban form – streets, urban blocks, plots and buildings – structuring our cities and the fundamental actors and processes of transformation shaping these elements. It then applies this analytical framework to describe the evolution of cities over history as well as to explain the functioning of contemporary cities. After the initial focus on the ‘object’ (cities) the book describes how different researchers and different schools of thought have been dealing with this object since the emergence of Urban Morphology, as the science of urban form, in the turning to the twentieth century. Finally, the book tries to identify what are the most important (and specific) contributions that Urban Morphology has to offer to contemporary cities, societies and economies.

Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.

The urban legacy of the Global South since the colonial era and how sustainable development and environmental and social justice can be achieved. Remarkably little of the expansive literature on development and globalization considers actual urban form and the physical design of cities as outcomes of these phenomena. The development that has shaped historic transformations in urban form and urbanism—and the consequent human experiences—remains largely unexplored. In this book, Tridib Banerjee fills this void by linking the idea of development with those of urbanism, urban form, and urban design, focusing primarily on the contemporary cities in the developing world—the Global South—and their intrinsic prospects in city design. Further, he examines the endogenous possibilities for the future design of these cities that may address growing inequality and the environmental crisis. Banerjee deftly traces the urban legacy of the Global South from the beginning of the colonial era, closely examining the economic, political, and ideological forces that influenced colonial and postcolonial development, drawing from relevant experiences of different cities in the developing world and discussing the arguments for the historic parity of these cities with their Western counterparts. Finally, Banerjee considers essential notions of future city design that are grounded in the critical challenges of sustainable development, equity, environmental and social justice, and diversity, and how such outcomes can be achieved. This book serves as the opening of a long overdue conversation among design, development, and planning scholars and practitioners, and those interested in the urban development of the Global South.

This is the first time an overview of the theories and practice of urban design has been offered. Covering a 50-year span, the book seeks to identify built urban design projects and traces the evolution and separation of American urban design theories up to the end of the twentieth century. It includes contemporary designs, projects, and writings in an attempt to identify future directions of the next century.

For the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population is urban. A fundamental aspect of this transformation has been the emergence of giant cities, or megacities, that present major new challenges. This book examines how issues of megacity development, urban form, sustainability, and unsustainability are conceived, how governance processes are influenced by these ideas, and how these processes have in turn influenced outcomes on the ground, in some cases in transformative ways. Through 15 in-depth case studies by prominent researchers from around the world, this book examines the major challenges facing megacities today. The studies are organized around a shared set of concerns and questions about issues of sustainability, land development, urban governance, and urban form. Some of the main questions addressed are: What are the most pressing issues of sustainability and urban form in each megacity? How are major issues of sustainability understood and framed by policymakers? Is urban form considered a significant component of sustainability issues in public debates and public policy? Who are the key actors framing urban sustainability challenges and shaping urban change? How is unsustainability, risk, or disaster imagined, and how are those concerns reflected in policy approaches? What has been achieved so far, and what challenges remain? The publication of this book is a step toward answering these and other crucial questions.

Why does modern planning sometimes create urban environments that are less attractive and functional than the organic urbanism of traditional cities? Cities Design and Evolution takes up the challenge of this question, investigating how cities are put together, both in the sense of how the parts are organized in relation to the whole, and how they are created or evolve over time. Cities Design and Evolution offers an engaging and original narrative that interprets planning philosophies from Modernism to New Urbanism, organic theories from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier, and evolutionary thinking from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins. The book develops a new evolutionary perspective that recognizes both the designed and organic nature of cities, and provides a rationale and impetus for fresh approaches to urban planning and design. In what is the first book to significantly apply modern evolutionary thinking to urbanism, Cities Design and Evolution promises to stimulate thought, debate and action concerning the nature of cities and future urban planning. The book should appeal to all who are interested in cities, in design and in evolution. "

This book focuses on the spatial transformations in the most dynamically evolving urban areas of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It links the restructuring of the built environment with the underlying processes and the forces of socio-economic reforms. The detailed accounts of the spatial transformations in a key moment of urban history in the region enhance our understanding of the linkages between society and space.

Barcelona is regarded as a prototype of a European Mediterranean city with a long urban tradition. It has undergone a specific process of historic formation: density and compactness of urban form, evolution by extension rather than by reform. A history of urban planning necessarily includes a summary of the territorial and urban experience, the physical dimensions of the city that condition its cultural and economic development. This book centers on the construction of Barcelona, taking as its basis the most important planning operations and city projects, and drawing from diverse sources and phases. The local scale of many of the projects contrasts with the cosmopolitan aspirations that have made these interventions so innovative; including major projects for special events, such as the 1888 (World Exhibition), 1929 (Electrical Industries Exhibition) and 1992 (Olympic Games). New prospects are emerging from the recent European institutional framework, particularly changes in the economic system to a post-industrial phase. The urban planning history of Barcelona shows how the city has overcome major contradictions.