Today's urban resident is seeking a more flexible, sustainable environment-representing a unique, diverse, vibrant, and responsible way of living-as an alternative to the typical development patterns of suburban and semi-urban sprawl. Can urban design help create this type of sustainable urbanism? Grid Street Place presents a unique approach to understanding urban design through scientific, empirical research. The authors examined more than 100 successful projects throughout North America to identify differences and commonalities, and they discovered universal elements that characterize sustainable urban districts. By applying these essential elements, designers and developers can recreate and extend the experience of successful places to their communities. Myriad plans, sections, diagrams, and charts illustrate how each district work-at an extremely detailed level. Concrete examples, as opposed to generalities, make Grid Street Place a must-read for anyone interested in the working strategies of urban design.

Winner of the 2015New York City Book Award The never-before-told story of the grid that ate Manhattan You either love it or hate it, but nothing says New York like the street grid of Manhattan. This is its story. Praise for City on a Grid "The best account to date of the process by which an odd amalgamation of democracy and capitalism got written into New York's physical DNA."--New York Times Book Review "Intriguing...breezy and highly readable."--Wall Street Journal "City on a Grid tells the too little-known tale of how and why Manhattan came to be the waffle-board city we know."--The New Yorker "[An] expert investigation into what made the city special."--Publishers Weekly "A fun, fascinating, and accessible read for those curious enough to delve into the origins of an amazing city."--New York Journal of Books "Koeppel is the very best sort of writer for this sort of history."--Roanoke Times

Spectacular modern aerial photographs of twenty-three of the towns dramatically illustrate changes to the urban scene and demonstrate the lasting influence of the initial city patterns on subsequent growth.

"A collection of essays examining how patterns of use and attitudes to green spaces within Penn's city plan and along the Schuylkill informed notions of place from the time of Philadelphia's founding to the formation of the modern Fairmount Park system in the mid-19th century"--Provided by publisher.

There is an emerging consensus that urban street layouts should be planned with greater attention to ‘placemaking’ and urban design quality, while maintaining the conventional transport functions of accessibility and connectivity. However, it is not always clear how this might be achieved: we still tend to have different sets of guidance for main road networks and for local streetgrids. What is needed is a framework that addresses both of these, plus main streets – that don’t easily fit either set of guidance – in an integrative manner. Streets and Patterns takes up this challenge to create a coherent rationale to underpin today’s streets-oriented urban design agenda. Informed by recent research, the book looks behind existing design conventions and beyond immediate policy rhetoric, and analyses a range of first principles – from Le Corbusier and Colin Buchanan to New Urbanism. The book provides a new framework for the design and planning of urban layouts, integrating transport issues such as road hierarchy, arterial streets and multi-modal networks with urban design and planning issues such as street type, grid type, mixed-use blocks and urban design coding.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.