A ROUTLEDGE FREEBOOK URBAN DESIGN TOOLS & RESOURCES FOR THE PLANNING PRACTITIONER TABLE OF CONTENTS 03 :: INTRODUCTION 07 :: 1. THE STREET 48 :: 2. FOOD & BUSINESS: A BIRD IN THE HAND IS WORTH TWO IN THE BUSH 66 :: 3. TRANSFORMATIONS: URBANISM AS TRANSFORMATION 79 :: 4. PEOPLE, PLACES, AND WELLBEING 105 :: 5. EVERYDAY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AS A BASIS FOR DESIGN introduction HOW TO USE THIS BOOK The five chapters featured in Urban Design: Tools & Resources for the Planning Practitioner—as well as the titles from which we’ve excerpted them—share the goal of making urban areas functional, attractive, and sustainable. Our aim in selecting the excerpts included here was to highlight some of our newest practitioner-oriented titles, and illustrate the global scope of the work being done in this field. In reading through this FreeBook, you’ll find not only that the authors of these selections are based all over the world, but also that their approach to their work reflects a truly global outlook. The focus on practicality in Urban Design makes this FreeBook an ideal resource for urban design practitioners, but it should also prove useful to professionals across the Built Environment, including those in architecture, planning and even urban geographers and policymakers. Although we conceived Urban Design as a cohesive whole, we also encourage you to jump around and take advantage of the chapters that have the most relevance to you. And, of course, keep in mind that all of the titles included here are available in full from our website (www.routledge.com) and other fine booksellers. CHAPTER 1- THE STREET This FreeBook opens with a chapter from Robert Mantho’s The Urban Section: An Analytical Tool for Cities and Streets. Here, Mantho formulates the proposition that structures The Urban Section, notably the idea that the street is the city’s basic building block, and that an understanding of the role and function of the street is essential to an understanding of the city’s design. Following this is a review of some of the literature on the street and street design. The chapter also includes numerous illustrations, drawn to scale, that highlight specific features of street design, providing the reader with clear examples of the concepts Mantho discusses. Robert Mantho is the Stage 5 Leader at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. CHAPTER 2 – FOOD + BUSINESS: A BIRD IN THE HAND IS WORTH TWO IN THE BUSH In this second chapter—the opening chapter of Food City—innovative architect and urban designer CJ Lim explores the issue of urban transformation and how the creation, storage and distribution of food has been and can again become a construct ROUTLEDGE 3 ROUTLEDGE.COM introduction for the practice of everyday life. Food City investigates the reinstatement of food at the core of national and local governance — how it can be a driver to restructure employment, education, transport, tax, health, culture, communities, and the justice system, re-evaluating how the city functions as a spatial and political entity. CJ Lim takes a look at multiple examples of city- and community-based movements that are fighting the large, multinational corporations that have come to dominate the global food and beverage industry. With examples like the United Kingdom town of Totnes and Japanese Kobe Beef functioning as brief case studies, Lim uses food as a lens to study urban transformation. CJ Lim is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Bartlett UCL. CHAPTER 3 – TRANSFORMATIONS: URBANISM AS TRANSFORMATION Designing Urban Transformation is structured around a central argument, which author Aseem Inam lays out in the book’s preface: “How we think about cities absolutely impacts how we design them”. With this in mind, Inam uses the philosophy of Pragmatism as a means by which to study and understand urban transformation, suggesting that only looking at transformation through a perspective informed by social science is inadequate. As he states, “Pragmatism encourages us to remember and build into practice the notion that our world is in flux with fluid boundaries between concepts and space, and that creative and experimental interventions can have concrete transformative social and physical effects on reality.” Aseem Inam is Associate Professor of Urbanism at the New School. CHAPTER 4 – PEOPLE, PLACES, AND WELL-BEING In the opening pages of this chapter from Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns: Designing and Retrofitting for Sustainability, author Avi Friedman states that his purpose is to examine “general human attributes of small towns and [relate] them to places. The manifestations of the term ‘social capital’ are explored, the notions of places and place-making are studied, and selected gathering places and their contribution to the communal fabric described. The chapter ends with a case study about a town that went on to restructure its urban makeup by introducing unique meeting spots.” Friedman explores the varied ways that urban spaces contribute to and foster the well-being of their inhabitants. His case study, on the Canadian city of Peace River, ROUTLEDGE 4 ROUTLEDGE.COM introduction works to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the characteristics and features of a city can enhance and enrich the lives of its population. Avi Friedman is Professor in the School of Architecture at McGill University. CHAPTER 5 – EVERYDAY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AS A BASIS FOR DESIGN In this final chapter, Urban Design comes full circle, having begun in the same way it concludes: with a chapter on the street. In his introduction to The Street: A Quintessential Public Space, author Vikas Mehta writes that “streets are powerful tools of urban design and consequently of understanding and making the city legible. Looking at the street, then, is also looking at the city, perhaps in a non-traditional way, but from the viewpoint of the pedestrian.” Here, Mehta compares two approaches to street design: that which is dictated by visual-aesthetic thinking and that which is determined by the social behaviors that take place in urban spaces. Arguing in favor of design that takes social behavior into account, Mehta also reviews the theories behind this approach. Vikas Mehta is the Fruth/Gemini Chair, the Ohio Eminent Scholar of Environment/ Urban Design, and Associate Professor at the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati. ROUTLEDGE 5 ROUTLEDGE.COM GET THE RESOURCES YOU NEED FOR YOUR URBAN DESIGN PRACTICE USE DISCOUNT CODE UDP15 FOR 20% OFF ALL PLANNING & URBAN DESIGN TITLES PLANNING & URBAN DESIGN Visit us online to check out our full range of titles on Planning & Urban Design. >> CLICK HERE CHAPTER 1 THE STREET 1 :: THE STREET Although human settlement occurs without streets it is possible to suggest that the street is the fundamental “city” element, the building block of cities. The city can be defined as a physical, social, economic and political entity that grows out of the shared civic conception that individual actions must be moderated for the benefit of the community. If cities are the largest manifestation of this civil understanding, then the street is the physical manifestation of this idea. The street is a delineated area for common use, framed by a collection of individual structures, whose purpose is to The following is sourced from The Urban Section: An Analytical serve the function of circulation and exchange: social and material. The process Tool for Cities and Streets through which streets are determined has taken innumerable forms throughout by Robert Mantho. history, from the carefully planned to the seemingly arbitrary; however, they all ©2015 Taylor and Francis Group. All rights reserved. begin with an agreement that individual privileges are limited for social benefit in a particularly defined concrete space.1 A cluster of buildings owned by separate Purchase a copy HERE . individuals without a recognised public space, which everyone can use, is a settlement, but not a town or urban entity. This is not to deny the definition of community to those places without a defined public space; it is to assert that the physical recognition of the shared, communal place is essential to the definition of town or city. Possibly this is fundamentally an issue of scale. When those sharing a territory belong to a single family or are small enough in number that social intimacy is strong enough to regulate behaviour, the formal recognition of the civic may not be necessary. However, when the size and make-up of the group expand beyond this, communal understanding is required and the definition of public space is necessary. Making clear to everyone what space they are allowed to move in and through freely and where individual private space begins.2 This foundational nature of the street, coupled with the fact that physically without the street cities could not exist, places the street at the centre of all urban discussions.3 From the earliest examples of urban design in Europe, through the renaissance, the baroque period, the late 19th-century advocacy for medieval patterns and even in the Modernist attempts to refashion the Street, the design of streets has been at the heart of urban design. In addition to the strictly utilitarian and physical role that streets play, the street is 1 Spiros Kostof. (1992). The City Assembled also a social instrument. The street’s practical provision also facilitates social – The Elements of Urban Form Through engagement at many levels. Streets provide the place to interact; with those we know History. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 189 and Joseph Rykwert. (1982). The and those we don’t. From commercial exchange, arranged entertainment, accidental Necessity of Artifice: Ideas in Architecture. meeting, to people watching,4 the use of streets for social interaction and the London: Academy Editions.