Urban planning and architecture book reviews

This book is the standard rant that automobiles are bad, suburbs are bad, city life is good, etc. It doesn't say much about the problems of suburban development that Jane Jacobs didn't cover first and better. I'd recommend Garreau's "Edge City", instead, for a dissenting view on urban planning.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

This classic book explains exactly what was wrong with big cities in the 1950's.

How Buildings Learn : What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand.

Stewart Brand has directed his eclectic intelligence to here most architecture leaves off: what happens after a building is completed. This fascinating exposition of what makes some buildings adaptable and some buildings hostile to the user contains surprising facts; for instance, Santa Fe's trademark adobe style was actually developed in the 1920's to enhance tourism and is based on a Colorado warehouse. The book also includes pairs of photographs of sites from identical angles but decades apart.

Edge City : Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau.

Garreau claims that traditional cities with downtowns are no longer important, and the new center of growth is "Edge Cities", high-density suburban nodes of housing and offices. This surprising book provides the exact opposite perspective to "The Geography of Nowhere", claiming that automobiles and suburbs are what people want, mass transportation is generally hopeless, and city life is not as good as the suburbs. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions, this book provides an entertaining exposition of edge cities, discussions of different schools of thought, and an amusingly cynical glossary of developers' terms and rules of thumb.

A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein.

Are there specific rules, from the city planning level to the details of house construction, that will lead to better architecture? This book claims so, with 253 rules (called "patterns") forming a language for better design. Despite its popularity (including in object-oriented programming circles, surprisingly enough) this book is more interesting in its concept than in the actual reading.

The Corner : A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood by David Simon, Edward Burns.

Not strictly an urban planning book, The Corner provides a ground-zero look at what happens when an urban area (Baltimore) falls apart. This year-long documentary follows a handful of individuals living in the heart of the inner-city drug slums, providing a heart-wrenching closeup of life in a stricken urban area. The book provides an indictment of the war on drugs, the welfare system, and inner-city education, ending with little hope for solutions.

Ken Shirriff: shirriff@eng.sun.com This page: http://www.righto.com/books/urban.html Copyright 1998 Ken Shirriff.

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