Books, Nonfiction, Urban Planning & Development, New Towns

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Witold Rybczynski
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town: Real Estate Development from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway
by Scribner (Paperback)

When Witold Rybczynski first heard about New Daleville, it was only a developer's idea, attached to ninety acres of cornfield an hour and a half west of Philadelphia. Over the course of five years, Rybczynski met and talked to everyone involved in the building of this residential subdivision -- from the developers to the township leaders, whose approval they needed, to the home builders and engineers and, ultimately, the first families who moved in.Always eloquent and illuminating, the award-winning author of Home and A Clearing in the Distance looks at this "neotraditional" project, with its houses built close together to encourage a sense of intimacy and community, and explains the trends in American domestic architecture -- from where we place our kitchens and fences to why our bathroomsget larger every year.Last Harvest was voted one of the ten best books of 2008 by the editors of Planetizen, and as Publishers Weekly said, "Rybczynski provides historical and cultural ...

John J. Macionis, Vincent N. Parrillo
Cities and Urban Life (4th Edition) (MySearchLab Series)
by Prentice Hall (Hardcover)

Cities and Urban Life, authored by two of the best-known textbook writers in the field, provides a comprehensive introduction to urban sociology, urban anthropology, and urban studies courses. Primarily sociological in approach, this book incorporates historical, social psychological, geographical, and anthropological insights. While strong in the classical urban sociology, it also gives extensive attention to the "new" political economy approach to urban studies. Also, the authors use global cities as case studies for more relevance to students.  

Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space
by Hill & Wang Pub (Hardcover)

America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.

Richard Sexton
Rosemary Beach
by Pelican Publishing Company (Hardcover)

Designed by planning pioneers Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk--the same husband and wife team who rose to prominence for their design of Seaside--Rosemary Beach is a decidedly different community. Whereas Seaside evokes small-town America, Rosemary Beach evokes the ambiance of a preindustrial city, featuring a more urban landscape than previous New Urbanism developments. Three concepts are integral to the design of Rosemary Beach homes. First, the incorporation of the European Colonial architecture of the West Indies and New Orleans, ideal for tropical climates, became the prototypical house design, including façade-length porches, large windows and doorways, and steep roofs. This design also mandates that the structure be raised on a masonry base so that the main living level is sufficiently elevated to catch the ocean breeze. Second, the building of a wooden frame above a masonry base, providing an enclosure for off-street parking as well ...

Seaside Institute
Views of Seaside: Commentaries and Observations on a City of Ideas
by Rizzoli (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-11-04)

Seaside, Florida, is a town designed as an "ideal" community, where houses have front porches and verandas, picket fences, sleeping porches, where streets are carved and paved with brick, and sidewalks are made of pebbles and seashells. This resort town on Florida’s panhandle coast has had an extraordinary impact on the thinking of architects, developers, planners, traffic engineers, sociologists, environmentalists, and even political thinkers. As the first, the most widely published, and now at twenty-five by far the most esteemed and well-known example of the revival of traditional neighborhood design, Seaside has become the icon of the New Urbanism movement, and has been emulated extensively.

Borden Painter
Mussolini's Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (Italian & Italian American Studies)
by Palgrave Macmillan (Paperback) (Release Date: 2007-03-06)

After coming to power in 1922, Mussolini spent two decades rebuilding Rome as the foremost site and symbol of the new fascist order. Through an ambitious program of demolition and construction, he sought to make Rome a capital that both embraced modernity while preserving and glorifying the city's ancient past. This intriguing book reveals Mussolini's tremendous and lasting impact on the city to which millions flock each year.

William S. Worley
J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities
by University of Missouri Press (Paperback)

Chronicles the success of J.C. Nichols, the architect who changed the shape of Kansas City in the 1930s, and has influenced urban development throughout the USA. Nichols created the Country Club Plaza, an upscale mid-town shopping centre, and the surrounding urban community.

Seaside: Making a Town in America
by Princeton Architectural Press (Paperback)

Mark Francis
Village Homes: A Community By Design (Landscape Architecture Foundation Land and Community Design Case Study Series)
by Island Press (Paperback)

The Village Homes neighborhood in Davis, California is one of the few long-standing examples of sustainable community design. Mark Francis has been studying Village Homes for more than two decades and brings together existing research and writing on the community, studies about the children of Village Homes he conducted throughout the 1980s, and interviews with many parties involved with the project including designers, residents, gardeners, and maintenance people. He takes a critical look at Village Homes, addressing its failures as well as its successes, and examines the question of why, despite its success, this development has not been replicated.

Volker M. Welter
Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life
by The MIT Press (Hardcover)

Winner in the 2003 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Competition in the Scholarly Illustrated category. The Scottish urbanist and biologist Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of "region" to architecture and planning. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was one of the strongest advocates of town planning and an active participant in debates about the future of the city. He was arguably the first planner to recognize the importance of historic city centers, and his renewal work in Edinburgh's Old Town is visible and impressive to this day. Geddes's famous analytical triad—place, work, and folk, corresponding to the geographical, historical, and spiritual aspects of the city—provides the basic structure of this examination of his urban theory. Volker Welter examines Geddes's ideas in the light of nineteenth-century biology—in which Geddes received his academic training—showing Geddes's use of biological concepts to be far ...

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