The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths PDF Download

Author: Randal O'Toole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Author: Oliver Gillham
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781597263498
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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One of the great debates of our time concerns the predominant form of land use in America today -- the all too familiar pattern of commercial and residential development known as sprawl. But what do we really know about sprawl? Do we know what it is? Where did it come from? Is it really so bad? If so, what are the alternatives? Can anything be done to make it better? The Limitless City offers an accessible examination of those and related questions. Oliver Gillham, an architect and planner with more than twenty-five years of experience in the field, considers the history and development of sprawl and examines current debates about the issue. The book: offers a comprehensive definition of sprawl in America traces the roots of sprawl and considers the factors that led to its preeminence as an urban and suburban form reviews both its negative impacts (loss of open space, increased pollution, gridlock) as well as its positive aspects (economic development, personal freedom, privacy) considers responses to sprawl including "smart growth," urban growth boundaries, regional planning, and the New Urbanism looks at what can be done to improve and counterbalance sprawl The author argues that whether we like it or not, sprawl is here to stay, and only by understanding where it came from and why it developed will we be able to successfully address the problems it has created and is likely to create in the future. The Limitless City is the first book to provide a realistic look at sprawl, with a frank recognition of its status as the predominant urban form in America, now and into the near future. Rather than railing against it, Gillham charts its probable future course while describing critical efforts that can be undertaken to improve the future of sprawl and our existing urban core areas.

Author: Jan Harold Brunvand
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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From the master folklorist and sly wit, Jan Brunvand, comes a collection of all-new urban legends. Did your cousin's wife's dentist's daughter go to the tanning parlor once too often and had her insides cooked? Has your husband's brother's nephew teacher try to make a dead rabbit look alive? If so, you've heard—or you yourself may have told—two of the seventy-plus legends in this collection. Urban legends are "those bizarre but believable stories about batter-fried rats, spiders in hairdos, Cabbage Patch dolls that get funerals, and the like that pass by word of mouth as being the gospel truth." But of course, though often told as having happened to a FOAF (friend of a friend), they aren't true. Included in this collection are legends about sex, horror, cars, business, and academia. Among them are "The Bible Student's Exam," "The Pregnant Shoplifter," "The Ice Cream Cone Caper," "Don't Mess with Texas," and "Mrs. Fields' Cookie Recipe."

Author: William S. Saunders
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452907617
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Sprawl is the single most significant and urgent issue in American land use at the turn of the twenty-first century. Efforts to limit and reform sprawl through legislative “Smart Growth” initiatives have been enacted around the country while the neotraditionalist New Urbanism has been embraced by many architects and urban planners. Yet most Americans persist in their desire to live farther and farther away from urban centers, moving to exurbs made up almost entirely of single-family residential houses and stand-alone shopping areas. Sprawl and Suburbia brings together some of the foremost thinkers in the field to present in-depth diagnosis and critical analysis of the physical and social realities of exurban sprawl. Along with an introduction by Robert Fishman, these essays call for architects, urban planners, and landscape designers to work at mitigating the impact of sprawl on land and resources and improving the residential and commercial built environment as a whole. In place of vast residential exurbs, these writers offer visions of a fresh urbanism—appealing and persuasive models of life at greater density, with greater diversity, and within genuine communities. With sprawl losing the support of suburban citizens themselves as economic, environmental, and social costs are being paid, Sprawl and Suburbia appears at a moment when design might achieve some critical influence over development—if architects and planners accept the challenge. Contributors: Mike Davis, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Peter Hall, David Harvey, Jerold S. Kayden, Matthew J. Kiefer, Alex Krieger, Andrew Ross, James S. Russell, Mitchell Schwarzer. William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at the Harvard Design School. He is the author of Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller. Robert Fishman is professor of architecture and urban planning at the Taubman College of Architecture, University of Michigan. He is author of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia and editor of The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy.

Author: Benjamin Ross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019026330X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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A witty, readable, and highly original tour through the history of America's suburbs and cities to uncover the human impulses that keep sprawl spreading

Author: William Riebsame Travis
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597266140
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Reconciling explosive growth with often majestic landscape defines New Geographies of the American West. Geographer William Travis examines contemporary land use changes and development patterns from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and assesses the ecological and social outcomes of Western development. Unlike previous "boom" periods dependent on oil or gold, the modern population explosion in the West reflects a sustained passion for living in this specific landscape. But the encroaching exurbs, ranchettes, and ski resorts are slicing away at the very environment that Westerners cherish. Efforts to manage growth in the West are usually stymied at the state and local levels. Is it possible to improve development patterns within the West's traditional anti-planning, pro-growth milieu, or is a new model needed? Can the region develop sustainably, protecting and managing its defining wildness, while benefiting from it, too? Travis takes up the challenge , suggesting that functional and attractive settlement can be embedded in preserved lands, working landscapes, and healthy ecologies.

Author: Roger W. Caves
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134528469
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
The Encyclopedia of the City focuses on the key topics encountered by undergraduates and scholars in urban studies and allied fields. Contributors include major theoreticians and practitioners, and on other individuals, groups, and organizations which study the city or practice in a field that directly or indirectly affects the city, the Encyclopedia necessarily adopts an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective. A solid but also provocative starting point for wider exploration of the city, this is a first-class work of reference that will be an essential resource for independent study as well as a useful aid in teaching.

Author: Brian Ladd
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226467414
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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"From the Model T to the SUV, Autophobia reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new - in fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century now, ever since the automobile was invented."--Jacket.

Author: Robert E. Stipe
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863211
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Surveying the past, present, and future of historic preservation in America, this book features fifteen essays by some of the most important voices in the field. A Richer Heritage will be an essential, thought-provoking guide for professionals as well as administrators, volunteers, and policy makers involved in preservation efforts. An introduction traces the evolution of historic preservation in America, highlighting the principal ideas and events that have shaped and continue to shape the movement. The book also describes the workings--legal, administrative, and fiscal--of the layered federal, state, and local government partnership put in place by Congress in 1966. Individual chapters explore the preservation of designed and vernacular landscapes, the relationship between historic preservation and the larger environmental and land-trust movements, the role of new private and nonprofit players, racial and ethnic interests in historic preservation, and the preservation of our intangible cultural values. A concluding chapter analyzes the present state of the historic preservation movement and suggests future directions for the field in the twenty-first century. Contributors include preservationists, local-government citizen activists, an architect, landscape architects, environmentalists, an archaeologist, a real-estate developer, historians, a Native American tribal leader, an ethnologist, and lawyers.

Author: Witold Rybczynski
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743235975
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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The bestselling author of "Home" and "A Clearing in the Distance" tells the compelling story of the transformation of a Pennsylvania cornfield into a neotraditional housing development--taking the reader on a revelatory inside tour of real estate in America.