The Preservation Foundation

The following is a selection of books which might prove useful as background material on urban and town planning.  None should be considred required reading to participate in the the charrette, only as helpful aids.

 

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

 

$21.95 suggested retail price.

ISBN # 9780679600473

Described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.

 

 

 

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford

 

$29.00 suggested retail price.

ISBN # 9780156180351

Famed New Yorker architecture critic Lewis Mumford's analysis of the city’s development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award in 1962. Called "one of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century” by the Christian Science Monitor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community by Peter Katz

 

$59.95 suggested retail price.

ISBN # 9780070338890

"A growing movement to replace charmless suburban sprawl with civilized, familiar places that people love." So wrote Time magazine in a recent article about Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Peter Calthorpe, leaders of the dynamic urban design revolution coming to be known as the New Urbanism. Their breakthrough planning concepts propose a vision of the future that combines the best of the past with the realities and modern conveniences of today.

Part of a broader trend toward the restoration of community and concern for a more sustainable environment, the New Urbanism addresses many of the crucial issues of our time: the decline of America's cities, the rebuilding of its crumbling infrastructure, housing affordability, crime and traffic congestion. The extensively documented case studies in this book include photographs, drawings, diagrams and urban design codes—more than 500 images in all, a majority of which are in color. Essays by the movement's leading practitioners clearly articulate the principles of the New Urbanism. Commentaries by prominent architecture and urban planning theorists complete this comprehensive publication.

The New Urbanism advocates an ambitious yet pragmatic agenda for the building and rebuilding of our neighborhoods, towns and cities. This book provides an invaluable guide to this emerging movement forarchitects, urban planners, civic leaders and concerned citizens; it is also must reading for anyone who cares about the future of America's communities.

 

 

 

The American City: What Works, What Doesn't by Alexander Garvin

 

$59.95 suggested retail price.

ISBN # 9780071373678

The book analyzes more than 300 key programs and projects initiated in 150 major cities, suburban areas, and towns—showing why some projects succeeded brilliantly in accomplishing their goals, why others failed, and the lessons to be learned from both the successes and the failures.

It is the author's contention that we DO know how to solve urban problems and have been successfully fixing cities for two centuries. He argues, that by studying and learning from the past, we CAN solve each seemingly intractable modern crises and the scarcity of public open space, the lack of safe, affordable housing, the degradation of the environment, the erosion of the tax base, and countless other problems plague our cities and suberbs.

The book presents six ingredients of project success—market, location, design, financing, entrepreneurship, and time—and examines the ways in which these factors affect success or failure. Garvin argues that project success is not enough, and that effective city planning occurs only when the project also improves the surrounding city. Consequently, he calls for a redefinition of urban and surburban planning in which public action generates a desirable, widespread, and sustained private market reaction.

Each of the 18 chapters describes various projects and demonstrates how the six ingredients affect the success or failure of planning in specific areas: for example, housing rehabilitation, revitalizing neighborhoods, land use regulation, and preserving the past. Some of the projects described in the 1st edition are updated, as is all of the statistical information. Sections on some newer areas of concern -- entertainment centers, stadiums, environmental issues, and loft housing -- are also added. The table of contents presents an outline of the information in each chapter, making it fairly easy to find subtopics of a particular area; however, the index makes it possible to find specific projects and more detailed information. The text is enhanced by the inclusion of well-chosen black-and-white photographs, someshowing before and after views of urban, and occasionally suburban, development.

 

 

 

Design of Cities by Edmund N. Bacon

 

$45.00 suggested retail price.

ISBN # 9780140042368

In a brilliant synthesis of words and pictures, Edmund N. Bacon relates historical examples to modern principles of urban planning. He vividly demonstrates how the work of great architects and planners of the past can influence subsequent development and be continued by later generations. By illuminating the historical background of urban design, Bacon also shows us the fundamental forces and considerations that determine the form of a great city.

 

 

 

 

Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century by Peter Hall

 

$41.95 suggested retail price.

ISBN # 9780631232520

The book offers a critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it.  It reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth century. Trenchant, perceptive, global in coverage, this book is an unrivalled account of its crucial subject. It has been comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new literature published since its original appearance, and to view the 1990s in historical perspective.