We Build The City features a selection of the exemplary infrastructure, public realm and civic building projects developed during New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration under Commissioner David Burney's groundbreaking Department of Design + Construction Excellence (D+CE) program. This publication celebrates the DDC's commitment to the idea that design matters and that great design reinvigorates public spaces and, ultimately, transforms people's lives. The DDC has been lauded for its fresh approach to facilitating innovative and collaborative architecture and urban planning solutions and improving public buildings, spaces and communities with a focus on design that reflects important key values: education and culture, health and safety, and diversity and opportunity. The D+CE program has offered dynamic design and construction strategies that have inspired some of the best architects and engineers in the world--and given the city's small firms--the opportunity to work with the DDC to reimagine and reshape the built environment. From the Queen's Botanical Garden, Mariner's Harbor Library, Brooklyn Children's Museum and the Bronx Museum of the Arts to Madison Avenue, Houston Street, Columbus Circle, the Central Park Precinct and PSAC II, the DDC and its pioneering D+CE initiative has helped to transform all five boroughs of the great City of New York. Highlighting the work of numerous talented design and construction firms, We Build The City showcases a collection of some the most notable public projects developed and built under the acclaimed D+CE program. Each featured project--whether large- or small-scale, visible or underground--has contributed to the improvement of the city, building upon principles of creativity, sustainability, performance, efficiency and longevity. The publication includes detailed drawings and striking imagery that reveal the complex processes that have shaped one of the most active and successful design periods in NYC's history.

Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.

Put on your hardhats and get to work at the construction site. Nothing is too big for these heavy-duty trucks to load and lift Read along and the building will be up in no time

An updated edition of the landmark classic by the leader of the ecocity movement

Computational design has become widely accepted into mainstream architecture, but this is the first book to advocate applying it to create adaptable masterplans for rapid urban growth, urban heterogeneity, through computational urbanism. Practitioners and researchers here discuss ideas from the fields of architecture, urbanism, the natural sciences, computer science, economics, and mathematics to find solutions for managing urban change in Asia and developing countries throughout the world. Divided into four parts (historical and theoretical background, our current situation, methodologies, and prototypical practices), the book includes a series of essays, interviews, built case studies, and original research to accompany chapters written by editor Tom Verebes to give you the most comprehensive overview of this approach. Essays by Marina Lathouri, Jorge Fiori, Jonathan Solomon, Patrik Schumacher, Peter Trummer, and David Jason Gerber. Interviews with Dana Cuff, Xu Wei Guo, Matthew Prior, Tom Barker, Su Yunsheng, and Brett Steele. Built case studies by Zaha Hadid Architects, James Corner Field Operations, XWG Studio, MAD, OCEAN Consultancy Network, Plasma Studio, Groundlab, Peter Trummer, Serie Architects, dotA, and Rocker-Lange Architects.

Many of us recognize the declining influence of the church today. And while we may be interested in doing something to reverse the trend, few of us realize we are part of the problem. Greg Forster comes to our aid by first laying out the historical factors that have contributed to the church's loss of influence in our society today. He then explores the significance of foundational practices such as preaching, worship, and discipleship—showing how the Holy Spirit uses them to produce joy in us that changes our churches, families, offices, and communities.

In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada in their relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons, policing and borders, as well as through purported care institutions such as hospitals and social work. The state also polices intimacy through mechanisms such as prison visits, strip searches and managing community contact with incarcerated people. Despite this, Jones argues, intimacy is integral to the ongoing struggles of prisoners for justice and liberation through the care work of building relationships and organizing with the people inside. Through characteristically fierce and personal prose and poetry, and motivated by a decade of prison justice work, Jones observes that abolition is not only a political movement to end prisons; it is also an intimate one deeply motivated by commitment and love.

This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and for ill. Carl Nightingale takes readers on a sweeping six-continent, six-millennia tour of the world's cities, culminating in the last 250 years, when we vastly accelerated our planetary realms of action, habitat, and impact, courting dangerous new consequences and opening prospects for new hope. In Earthopolis we peek into our cities' homes, neighborhoods, streets, shops, eating houses, squares, marketplaces, religious sites, schools, universities, offices, monuments, docklands, and airports to discover connections between small spaces and the largest things we have built. The book exposes the Urban Planet's deep inequalities of power, wealth, access to knowledge, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. It asks us to draw on the most just and democratic moments of Earthopolis's past to rescue its future.

Why, as more and more people inhabit cities, are individuals (and families) increasingly isolated and alienated from the world around them? Why do private living conditions materially improve, while public settings-neighborhoods and city centers-rapidly deteriorate? Why do American cities consume more land than any other cities in the world yet exist without true spaciousness and strangle in congestion? Why has desire for private, single-family homes worked against the development of effective urban systems? In his original analysis of modern American cities, Kenneth Schneider carefully evaluates the causes and effects of these paradoxes. Schneider shows that current city conditions are destructive to the happiness and well-being of people and demonstrates that much of the failure of cities stems from their basic form and structure, from outmoded traditions of citymaking, and from persistent urban policies based on economic growth and technological development. He present a new approach to the understanding of cities - ecological humanism-that combines concern for the well-being of both the city habitat and its inhabitants and thus provides one of the first genuinely social bases for reorganizing cities and their institutions.

Know Thyself: An Essay in Social Personalism proposes that social Personalism can best provide for self-knowledge. In the West, self-knowledge has been sought within the framework of two dominant intellectual traditions, order and the emerging self. On the one hand, ancient and medieval philosophers living in an orderly hierarchical society, governed by honor and shame, and bolstered by the metaphysics of being and rationalism, believed persons gain self-knowledge through uniting with the ground of their being; once united they would understand what they are, what they are to be, and what they are to do. On the other hand, Renaissance and modern thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola, Copernicus, Descartes, Locke, and Kant shattered the great achievement of the high middle ages and bequeathed to posterity an emerging self in a splintered world. Continuing their search for self-knowledge, the moderns found themselves faced with the dualism of the emerging self of the Renaissance and the natural world as understood by modern scientists. New problems spun out of this dualism, including the mind-body problem; the other minds problem; free will and determinism; the nature and possibility of social relationships; values, moral norms and their relationship to the natural and social worlds; and the relationships between science and religion. Finding self-knowledge among these splinters without a guiding orientation has proven difficult. Even though luminaries such as Spinoza, Berkeley, and Hegel attempted to bring order to the sundered elements, their attempts proved unsatisfactory. We contend that neither order nor the emerging self can adequately provide for self-knowledge. Since those culturally embodied “master narratives” lead us to an impasse, we turn to social Personalism. Self-knowledge developed in this book shows how persons in relation to the Personal learn who they are, what they are to become, and what they must do to achieve that goal. It also shows that the achievement of self-knowledge is supported by a natural, social, and cultural environment rooted in trust. In this humane and timely discussion, Thomas O. Buford offers a personalist understanding of self-knowledge that avoids the impersonalisms that erode the dignity of persons and their moral life which characterize modern life.