The world is urbanizing faster than current city design practices can sustain, climate change has introduced a new dynamism into what once appeared to be a stable environment, and – with effective city design more important than ever - there are controversies and uncertainties about the best way to manage unprecedented urban growth and change.
City Design describes the history and current practice of the four most widely accepted approaches to city design: the Modernist city of towers and highways that, beginning in the 1920s, has come to dominate urban development worldwide but is criticized as mechanical and soul-less; the Traditional organization of cities as streets and public places, scorned by the modernists, but being revived today for its human scale; Green city design, whose history can be traced back thousands of years in Asia, but is becoming increasingly important everywhere as sustainability and the preservation of the planet are recognized as basic issues, and finally Systems city design, which includes infrastructure and development regulation but also includes computer aided techniques which give designers new tools for managing the complexity of cities.
Jonathan Barnett is a well-known, widely-experienced city design practitioner who also teaches and writes about city design. He writes authoritatively but accessibly about complicated issues of theory and practice, and his approach is objective and inclusive. This is a comprehensive text on city design ideal for planners, landscape architects, urban designers and those who want to understand how to improve cities.
Reviews
"Jonathan Barnett is a believer (as am I) that architectural ideas have had a vital role in shaping cities. To bolster his assertion he lays out in City Design a rich history of the styles, movements, and ideas that have shaped cities from the Renaissance forward. He puts in context everything from "garden cities" to "megastructures" and places these movements in the broader ivic history. Particularly interesting is Barnett’s interweaving of landscape design and architecture, since few books have looked at the interdependence of the two fields and their effects on city design."– Craig Whitaker, Architectural Record
"According to Jonathan Barnett, FAICP, there are four different kinds of city design, and each has its insights and its blind spots. It will take more than one to meet such challenges as climate change, unprecedented growth, and the "inability of local institutions and a wide range of respected design professionals to respond effectively" to major city-design issues following 9/11 and Katrina….The book is brisk, straightforward, and magisterial, and the author, a professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Urban Design Program, seems to have been everywhere, read everything, and assessed it with precision (and without wasting words)….Perhaps this instant classic can do for the rancorous partisanship of city design wha...
