Definition at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanism
Broadly, urbanism is a focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment.
Design Oriented
| Cities for People, Jan Gehl, 2010 | Starred Review. In this fascinating look inside the key architectural factors that determine a city’s livability, award-winning Danish architect and author Gehl (Public Spaces, Public Life) examines the factors he deems essential to a successful city. Not surprisingly, places designed without good room for safe walking and biking lead to a sedentary life “behind steering wheel and computer screen.” A “lively” city, on the other hand, “counters the trend for people to withdraw into gated communities… | — | |
| Close encounters with buildings, Jan Gehl, et al, URBAN DESIGN International (2006) 11, 29–47. | CloseEnrountersWithBuildings_Gehl_2006— | — | |
| The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, | 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. | — |
Current Trend
| The city reader, 5th edition, Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout |
The Fifth Edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the best classic and contemporary writings on the city. It contains fifty-seven selections including seventeen new selections by Elijah Anderson, Robert Bruegmann, Michael Dear, Jan Gehl, Harvey Molotch, Clarence Perry, Daphne Spain, Nigel Taylor, Samuel Bass Warner, and others –five of which have been newly written exclusively for The City Reader. Classic writings from Ebenezer Howard, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, meet the best contemporary writings of Sir Peter Hall, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Kenneth Jackson and others. | ||
| The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, Charles Landry, (2nd ed. 2008) | From Charles Landry’s page on WikipediaHe contrasts the urban engineering approach to cities with creative city making. In the former there is a focus on the physical infrastructure or the hardware of the city, in the latter equal attention is paid to both hardware and software issues. Software is the human dynamics of a place, its connections and relationships as well as atmosphere. | — | |
| Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism, Mirko Zardini(ed), 2005 | Challenging the dominance of the visual in the urban environment, the exhibition catalogue Sense of the City proposes a re-thinking and re-presenting of the city, and offers a more complex analysis of the qualities, comforts, communication systems, and sensory dimensions of urban life. From darkness and night to urban soundscapes, to the urban air and climate, this book presents a new, “sensorial” approach to urbanism. In defense of public spaces in contemporary cities, writer Cedric Price has observed that “mental, physical, and sensory well-being is required.” Included here is a rich collection of images on the different urban themes addressed in the exhibition, along with a series of insightful and critical essays. |
Classics
| What’s a city, Lewis Mumford, Architectural Record, 1937 |
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 of the play. | ‘Urban Drama’ Concept. | |
| The image of the city, Kevin Lynch,1960 |
Typology of urban space as how it can be perceived/momorised. Path, Node, etc | ||
| The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, (first published in 1961) | 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 | — |