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CityReads│Planetizen Top 10 Books
Source: http://www.planetizen.com/node/72738/top-10-books-2015 Cover picture: http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/best-cityreads-2014/383860/
The Planetizen editorial staff based this year's list on a number of criteria, including editorial reviews, popularity, number of references, sales figures, recommendations from experts, and the book's potential impact on the urban planning, development, and design professions. We present our list in alphabetical order, and are not assigning rank. And now, on to the list!
Given the resilience (or revitalization, if you prefer) of many American cities in the face of the recent economic downturn, it would be natural to wonder if the young, well-educated populations moving to cities are aware of the fear, poverty, and anti-urban politics that beset cities throughout the 20th century. Ohio State University historian Steve Conn does not allow us to forget the anti-urban policies of the past with his book Americans Against the City; he also broadens the history of anti-urbanism with a surprising list of urban antagonists that reaches beyond the usual suspects. Conn's first anecdote of anti-urbanism stretches all the way back to William Penn in 1683. What follows is a relentless and often frustrating chronicle of the decay of urban centers and the eventual triumph of decentralization. Emerging from Conn's detailed historical and sociological analysis is a portrait of a country in a paradoxical relationship with its cities—despite the fundamental and powerful role of cities in the economic and social processes of the United States, the country has in turn treated cities like the bastard child of the political landscape. An aversion to urban density and all that it contributes to urban life, and a perception that the city was the place where "big government" first took root in America fostered what historian Steven Conn terms the "anti-urban impulse."
The Atlas of Cities presents a unique taxonomy of cities that looks at different aspects of their physical, economic, social, and political structures; their interactions with each other and with their hinterlands; the challenges and opportunities they present; and where cities might be going in the future. Each chapter explores a particular type of city—from the foundational cities of Greece and Rome and the networked cities of the Hanseatic League, through the nineteenth-century modernization of Paris and the industrialization of Manchester, to the green and “smart” cities of today. Expert contributors explore how the development of these cities reflects one or more of the common themes of urban development: the mobilizing function (transport, communication, and infrastructure); the generative function (innovation and technology); the decision-making capacity (governance, economics, and institutions); and the transformative capacity (society, lifestyle, and culture). Using stunning info-graphics, maps, charts, tables, and photographs, the Atlas of Cities is a comprehensive overview of the patterns of production, consumption, generation, and decay of the twenty-first century’s defining form.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Paris was known for isolated monuments but had not yet put its brand on urban space. But in a mere century Paris would be transformed into the modern and mythic city we know today. It was in that century that Paris went from being an agglomeration of villages to a unified metropolis. It was then that Paris became known as the City of Light, the city of love, and the city of all things fashionable. Though most people associate the signature characteristics of Paris with the public works of the nineteenth century, Joan DeJean demonstrates that the Parisian model for urban space was in fact invented two centuries earlier, when the first complete design for the French capital was drawn up and implemented. A century of planned development made Paris both beautiful and exciting. By 1700, Paris had become the capital that would revolutionize our conception of the city and of urban life. DeJean would have you forget about Baron Haussmann. For her money, 17th century advances made Paris the gorgeous, urbane place that it is today. Some advances were technological, such as street lighting, public transportation, and retail display cases. Others were physical, including the three big ones: the first truly public square (Place des Vosges), then the world’s greatest piece of public infrastructure (the Pont Neuf), and the world’s first infill development (Ille San Louis). Add to that parks, shops, and domestic tranquility, and Paris became a united, relatively egalitarian city. The city was available to everyone, and it could be enjoyed and not merely inhabited. It gave rise to coquettes and bankers and fashion designers and artists, all, DeJean argues, unburdened by aristocratic hierarchy. DeJean has a crucial lesson for planners: great cities do not just happen. They can be made.
The received wisdom of the modern era has been that the nation-state is the natural unit of global political organization. Cities, though important, have none of the heft needed to gird the world order. Benjamin Barber reveals the lunacy of this claim. In a globalized world, states do not interact with states, which are “quintessentially indisposed to cooperation,” so much as cities interact with cities. In a politically polarized world, cities favor pragmatism over ideology. These macro- and micro-scale reasons prompt Barber to argue that mayors—not presidents, CEOs, or generals—can, should, and maybe already do "rule the world." Barber is optimistic, perhaps overly so, that true democracy and true social mobility can prevail in cities. He calls for cities to foster civil society and grassroots democracy, defends the primacy of public space, and discusses many of the challenges that face cities from Los Angeles to Lagos. Barber's trope about mayors' play for global dominance is most a cover for a discussion of the role of cities as a whole—not just their mayors—in the context of globalization. And yet, he concludes with a quite literal policy prescription for a global "assembly of mayors." As fanciful as it seems, it's tempting to think about how that body would operate as compared to say, the United Nations or—god forbid—the United States Congress.
Le Corbusier's imprint is nearly unparalleled in the annals of city building, and his mission, to challenge the status quo of how cities are built, becomes more relevant with every instant megacity and gentrifying historic neighborhood. Modern Man is a riveting biography of Le Corbusier—a man who invented new ways of building and thinking. Corbusier isn’t just the grandfather of modern architecture but a man who sought to remake the world according to his vision, dispelling the Victorian style and replacing it with something never seen before.The benefit of Modern Man will come from demystifying of Le Courbusier's life, so that his work may be better understood. His legacy remains controversial today, as the world grapples with how to house its skyrocketing urban population and the cult of the “starchitect” continues to grow.
Architect Robert A.M. Stern, along with David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, conjured up a 1,000-plus-page gargantuan as an exhaustive study of an historic subject—namely the history of suburban planning before World War II. Renowned critic, Witold Rybczynski stated that Paradise Planned is destined as the "prime source" on the subject of garden cities. Paradise Planned is the definitive history of the development of the garden suburb, a phenomenon that originated in England in the late eighteenth century, was quickly adopted in the United State and northern Europe, and gradually proliferated throughout the world. These bucolic settings offered an ideal lifestyle typically outside the city but accessible by streetcar, train, and automobile.Today, the principles of the garden city movement are once again in play, as retrofitting the suburbs has become a central issue in planning. Paradise Planned is the comprehensive, encyclopedic record of this movement. The book provides detailed analysis, complete with plan drawings, illustrations, and maps, of projects as far away as Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Australia. The agenda of all this historic analysis: to lay the foundation for a better future for suburbia.
What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In RADICAL CITIES, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medillín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanized continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from.
The British Empire was never really about islands, continents, or, in the case of India, sub-continents. It was about cities. While the spoils went to London, a constellation of cities provided the administrative and commercial hubs for the empire’s territories. Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the great colonial and imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool. From the pioneers of early America to the builders of modern India, from west to east and back again, Hunt follows the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively moulded the colonial experience and which in their turn transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. This vivid and richly detailed imperial story, located in ten of the most important cities which the Empire constructed, demolished, reconstructed and transformed, allows us a new understanding of the British Empire's influence upon the world and the world's influence upon it.
At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite’s remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it’s hard to imagine there’s any uncharted ground left on the planet. In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination. Bonnett’s remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed. Or Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and crowning his wife as a princess. Or Baarle, a patchwork of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where walking from the grocery store’s produce section to the meat counter can involve crossing national borders. An intrepid guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight. Unruly places aren’t always exotic or remote—sometimes they're a matter of perspective, available in our own backyards. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travelers struck by wanderlust, Unruly Places will change the way you see the places you inhabit.
Why Place Matters responds to the threats to "place"—namely, that the modern American values of mobility and economic exchanges above all other considerations have robbed places of their potential as a benefit to the civic and cultural strength of communities. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society.The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.