The Continuous City

Download or read book The Continuous City written by Lars Lerup and published by Park Publishing (WI). This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourteen essays in The Continuous City offer a survey of Lerup's thinking on identity and monumentality and the relationship between nature and culture. His interest and reflections focus, among other things, on Roberto Burle Marx, a founder of modern landscape design; the 'dancing floors' of Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library; Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road project in Miami Beach; and the character of urban icons like Coop Himmelb(l)au's Dalian International Conference Center.

Download or read book Invisible Cities written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the evaluation of city form. 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.

Download or read book Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes written by Andre Viljoen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book on urban design extends and develops the widely accepted 'compact city' solution. It provides a design proposal for a new kind of sustainable urban landscape: Urban Agriculture. By growing food within an urban rather than exclusively rural environment, urban agriculture would reduce the need for industrialized production, packaging and transportation of foodstuffs to the city dwelling consumers. The revolutionary and innovative concepts put forth in this book have potential to shape the future of our cities quality of life within them. Urban design is shown in practice through international case studies and the arguments presented are supported by quantified economic, environmental and social justifications.

Download or read book Collage City written by Colin Rowe and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1984-03-15 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design and of the role of the architect-planner in an urban context. The authors, rejecting the grand utopian visions of "total planning" and "total design," propose instead a "collage city" which can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature.

Download or read book Inventing Future Cities written by Michael Batty and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future. Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected; in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries. Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities; argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy; describes the future “high-frequency,” real-time streaming city; considers urban sprawl and urban renewal; and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovation—an unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.

Download or read book Soft City written by David Sim and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.