Looking at the books I have chosen, one might say they are all rather long in the tooth. They are, yet they are also the books that inspired me to do what I do today which is to teach and research the subject of urban design. I am a Professor of Planning and Urban Design at The Bartlett, UCL and firmly believe that understanding a subject like my own begins from the foundations upwards. Each of these classic texts represents part of those foundations, foundations that my own work attempts to build upon.
I wrote
Public Places Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
The Death and Life of Great American Citieschallenged the way we view cities when it was written in the early 1960s. Instead of seeing cities as problems to be solved by moving people out of them or dividing them up with roads, Jane Jacobs made the argument that cities were about people, and the everyday lives of ordinary people – lived together, generate huge social, economic value. I always say to my own students, if you read nothing else while at UCL (apart from my own books of course!) you should read this. It is as relevant today as when it was first written.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…
I love dipping into this book. I first fell in love with it when studying for my postgraduate architecture degree when its images and poetic language captured my attention and I decided, as a result, to do a dissertation on the townscape of Nottingham (where I was studying). The book reminds me that the way places are shaped helps to inspire emotions in us, and if we shape them positively then those emotions will be positive, reinforcing our sense of well-being and helping us to love the places that we live. This book taught me how to look at cities, I highly recommend it.
This book pioneered the concept of townscape. 'Townscape' is the art of giving visual coherence and organization to the jumble of buildings, streets and space that make up the urban environment. It has been a major influence on architects, planners and others concerned with what cities should look like.
Homes by Byrd examines the story of this father-son team, demonstrating their impact on the design of homes in Southern California and describing the hallmarks of their enduring style.
Byrd homes are archetypes of California living. Many elements of a Byrd Home, such as exposed wood beams, turned posts, rock…
This third selection was published contemporaneously with the first two, but while the first two are really polemics, this book reports on empirical research. Perhaps because of that, it may seem a little dry, but the messages it has for us about the way we perceive cities are profound (albeit they have since been challenged). If you want to understand urban design then Kevin Lynch’s body of work is a must, and this is the best place to start.
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…
This book reports on a research project, this time undertaken by Christopher Alexander and his students. It is one of a number of books that attempts to ask deep questions about how places grow, and in particular about how they can grow positively in a manner that we instinctively feel to be ‘good.' Like Cullen’s book, this deeply influenced my own studies, this time of planning, when I remember conducting an experiment focused on piecemeal growth with a fellow student. The project emulated Alexander’s method and taught me a key lesson that has informed my own work ever since, namely that urban design is primarily a process. Get the process right and you are much more likely to get the outcomes you desire.
In this radical new look at the theory and practice of urban design, Christopher Alexander asks why our modern cities so often lack a sense of natural growth, and suggests a set of rules and guidelines by which we can inject that `organic' character back into our High Streets, buildings, and squares. At a time when so many of Britain's inner cities are undergoing, or are in need of, drastic renovation, Christopher Alexander's detailed account of his own experiments in urban-renewal in San Francisco makes thought-provoking reading.
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
Jan Gehl’s classic book Life Between Buildings makes the passionate case that Gehl has continued to advocate throughout his life that cities are for people not cars. In this respect, he echoes some of Jane Jacobs's arguments, but whereas the target of her ire was big developers (both public and private) for him it was all of us and the need for us to leave our cars at home and rejoice in the city as a place to walk, cycle and interact. Much of my own research has focused on public spaces and how we use and manage them. This book provides a great introduction.
The first Danish language version of this book, published in 1971, was very much a protest against the functionalistic principles for planning cities and residential areas that prevailed during that period. The book carried an appeal to show concern for the people who were to move about between buildings, and it urged an understanding of the subtle, almost indefinable - but definite - qualities, which have always related to the interaction of people in public spaces, and it pointed to the life between buildings as a dimension of architecture that needs to be carefully treated. Now 40 years later, many…
Public Places Urban Spaces is my attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the principles, theory, and practices of urban design. At the heart of the book are eight key dimensions of urban design theory and practice – temporal, perceptual, morphological, visual, social, functional, design governance, and place production, and these are used in the book to structure the huge and ever-expanding body of knowledge on the subject. Underpinning it all is the idea of urban design as a continuous process of shaping places, fashioned in turn by shifting global, local, and power contexts.
All this sounds incredibly complex, and it is, but Public Places Urban Spacestries to be your guide through it. I hope you enjoy it!
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.
