Category: Philsophy

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William H. Whyte, 2001(reprint of 1980)

http://www.amazon.com/Social-Life-Small-Urban-Spaces/dp/097063241X/ref=pd_sim_b_4

Chapter 1: The Life of Plazas

Chapter 2: Sitting Space

Chapter 3: Sun, Wind, Trees, Water

Chapter 4: Food

Chapter 5: The Street

Chapter 6: The “Undesirables”

Chapter 7: Effective Capacity

Chapter 8: Indoor Spaces

Chapter 9: Concourses and Megastructures

Chapter 10: Smaller Cities and Places

Chapter 11: Triangulation

Appendix A: Time-Lapse Filming

Appendix B: Digest of Open-Space Zoning Provisions, New York City

 

 

Product Description

In 1980, William H. Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly’s Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly’s legacy.

About the Author

William H. Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1917. He joined the staff of Fortune in 1946, after graduating from Princeton University and serving in the Marine Corps. His book The Organization Man (1956), based on his articles about corporate culture and the suburban middle class, sold more than two million copies. Whyte then turned to the topics of sprawl and urban revitalization, and began a distinguished career as a sage of sane development and an advocate of cities. Along with numerous articles and studies, Whyte edited and co-wrote The Exploding Metropolis (1957), and authored Cluster Development (1964), The Last Landscape (1968), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), and A Time of War: Remembering Guadalcanal, a Battle Without Maps (2000). He died in 1999.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, (first published in 1961)

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

From Wikipedia

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century. First published in 1961, the book is a critique of modernist planning policies claimed by Jacobs to be destroying many existing inner-city communities. Reserving her most vitriolic criticism for the “rationalist” planners (specifically Robert Moses) of the 1950s and 1960s, Jacobs argued that modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to find principles by which to plan cities. Among these policies the most violent was urban renewal; the most prevalent was and is the separation of uses (i.e. residential, industrial, commercial). These policies, she claimed, destroy communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces. Read more – Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia on Amazon

In the article: Bibliography

Review

“The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense.”—Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times”One of the most remarkable books ever written about the city… a primary work. The research apparatus is not pretentious—it is the eye and the heart—but it has given us a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city.”—William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man

The image of the city, Kevin Lynch, 1960

about Kevin Lynch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_A._Lynch

Review by UCSB

http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/62

Short film

http://youtu.be/iuWPCNIj_rA

Contents

  • I: The Image of the Environment
    • Legibility
    • Building the image
    • Structure and Identity
    • Imageability
  • II: Three Cities
    • Boston
    • Jersey City
    • Los Angeles
    • Common Themes
  • III: The City Image and Its Elements
    • Paths
    • Edges
    • Districts
    • Nodes
    • Landmarks
    • Element Interrelations
    • The Shifting Image
    • Image Quality
  • IV: City Form
    • Designing the Paths
    • Design of Other Elements
    • From Qualities
    • The Sense of the Whole
    • Metropolitan Form
    • The Process of Design
  • V: A New Scale

Appendices

  • A: Some References to Orientation
    • Types of Reference Systems
    • Formation of the Image
    • The Role of Form
    • Disadvantages of Imageability
  • B: The Use of the Method
    • The Method as the Basis for Design
    • Directions for Future Research
  • C: Two Examples of Analysis
    • Beacon Hill
    • Scollay Square
  • Bibliography

What’s a city, Lewis Mumford, Architectural Record, 1937

Lewis Mumford, “What is a City?”, from

Richard T. LeGates and  Frederic Stout, The City Reader. London:Routledge, 1996.

5th paragraph

The physical organization of the city may deflate this drama or make it frustrate; or it may, through the deliberate efforts of art, politics, and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifıes and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action ofthe play.

Lewis Mumford, 1895-1990

Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 1938

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, 1961

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford#Urban_civilization

In his influential book The City in History, which won the National Book Award, Mumford explores the development of urban civilizations. Harshly critical of urban sprawl, Mumford argues that the structure of modern cities is partially responsible for many social problems seen in western society. While pessimistic in tone, Mumford argues that urban planning should emphasize an organic relationship between people and their living spaces.

Mumford uses the example of the medieval city as the basis for the “ideal city,” and claims that the modern city is too close to the Roman city (the sprawling megalopolis) which ended in collapse; if the modern city carries on in the same vein, Mumford argues, then it will meet the same fate as the Roman city.

Mumford wrote critically of urban culture believing the city is “a product of earth … a fact of nature … man’s method of expression.”[6] Further Mumford recognized the crises facing urban culture, distrusting of the growing finance industry, political structures, fearful that a local community culture was not being fostered by these institutions. Mumford feared “metropolitan finance,” urbanisation, politics, and alienation.

“The physical design of cities and their economic functions are secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community.”

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé, 1995

About Marc Augé

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Aug%C3%A9

Marc Augé (born 1935 in Poitiers) is a French anthropologist.

In an essay and book of the same title, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), Marc Augé coined the phrase “non-place” to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places”. Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket.[1]

About the book

  • Non-Places: An introduction to supermodernity, Marc Auge, 1995
    • Introduction
      • 1992, urbanization, emerging ‘magelopolice’
      • triple ‘decentring’
        • 1st decenter: City and its importance is measured by its connection and attractiveness to the others.
        • 2nd decenter: Dwelling. Helmes has taken Hestia’s place -> means to day the computer and computer have replaces the hearth, where shadowy, feminine center of the house used to be.
        • 3rd decenter:  Individual. Decentered in a sense from himself. Mobilephones, TV, computers.. an individual is decentered from his immediate physical surrounding.

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan, 1977

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi-Fu_Tuan

Space/Place Definitions

In Space and Place : The Perspective of Experience, Tuan contends that a space requires a movement from a place to another place. Similarly, a place requires a space to be a place. Hence, the two notions are co-dependent.


Geography

On the 25th anniversary of its publication, a new edition of this foundational work on human geography.

In the twenty years since its original publication, Space and Place has not only established the discipline of human geography, but it has proven influential in such diverse fields as theatre, literature, anthropology, psychology, and theology. Eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time. He suggests that place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. Whether he is considering sacred versus “biased” space, mythical space and place, time in experiential space, or cultural attachments to space, Tuan’s analysis is thoughtful and insightful throughout.

Until retiring in 1998, Yi-Fu Tuan was a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is ranked among the country’s most distinguished cultural geographers and has earned numerous honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bracken Award for landscape architecture, and an award for meritorious contribution to geography from the Association of American Geographers. He was recently named the Lauréat d’Honneur 2000 of the International Geographers Union. He is the author of many essays and books, including Escapism (1998) and Cosmos and Hearth (Minnesota, 1999).

Sentient City, Mark Shepard(ed), 2011

Definition of Sentient City by Mark Shepard

“dataclouds of 21st century urban space” that shape the experience of those in it.

Book

  • Introduction: Mark Shepard
  • Toward the sentient city: Mark Shepard
  • Systems, Objectified: Hadas Steiner
  • Case Studies
    • New Interaction Partners for environmental governance:
      • Amphibious Architecture:
        • David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living) and Natalie Jaremijenko (xDesign Environmental Health Clinic)
    • Structuring Participation for an Energy Commons
      • Natural Fuse:
        • Usman Haque, Nitipak ‘Dot’ Samsen, Ai Hasegawa (Haque Design+Research)
    • Urban Digestive Systems
      • Trash Track:
        • MIT SENSEable City Lab
    • An International Failure for the Near Future
      • Too Smart City:
        • David Jimison and JooYoun Paek
    • Situating Knowledge Work in Contemporary Public Spaces
      • Breakout!: Escape from the Office:
        • Anthony Townsend, Antonina Simeti, Dana Spiegal, Laura Forlano, and Tony Bacigalupo
  • Essays
    • The Action is the Form: Keller Eastering
    • Interaction Anxieties: Omar Kahn
    • New Spatial Intelligence, or the Tree allowed to grow freely, but to man’s pattern: Dan Hill
    • Boxes Towards Bananas: Dispersal, Intelligence and Animal Structures: Matthew Fuller
    • Unsettling Topographic Representation: Saskia Sassen
    • The Urban Culture of Sentient Cities: From an Internet of Things to a Public Sphere of Things: Martijn de Waal
      • http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/in-a-sentient-city-what-is-public-or-private/16343
    • Space, Finance, and New Technologies: Kazys Varnelis
    • Your Mobility for Sale: Trebor Scholz
    • Comforts, Crisis, and the Rise of DIY Urbanism: Mimi Zeiger
    • Toward the Sentient City: Expecting the Extensible and Transmissible City: Anne Galloway
    • Postscript: Notes on Survival in the Sentient City: Mark Shepard

Exhibition

 

Blog article

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2009/10/toward-the-sentient-city.html