Content tagged with “city-planning”

“I have wanted to read this book for ages. I have a weird fascination with urban planning, and this book is held up as seminal. It’s from the 60s, and was written by the legendary Jane Jacobs. What I find interesting about the book is where it starts: with a chapter on sidewalks. I remember…”

“It’s a portmanteau of ‘extra’ and ‘urban.’ The Brookings Institution published a report in 2006 that identified three criteria: Economic connection to a large metropolis. Low housing density: bottom third of census tracts with regard to housing density. In 2000, this was a minimum of 2.6 acres…”

“This is a zoning code formula that compares the total floor size of a building (all floors together) to the lot size it’s built on. There are rules around this number. For example, if I want to build a 100-story building with each floor having 20,000 square feet of space, that’s a total of 2…”

“Thrilling story of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s, and the physician who tracked down the source. At the time, illness was thought to come from ‘bad air,’ but a physician named John Snow mapped the illnesses and determined that they were clustered around a water pump in Broad Street. No…”

“ A very deep, theoretical book on the design process, and on matching a solution to a problem. This one isn’t for the faint of heart. It attempts to distill the design process to math, almost. I got a little lost towards the end, but I love a deep dissection of a process like this, so it was fun. ”

“This book is undoubtedly interesting, but it’s a bit meandering. The basic idea is that…things (anything, apparently), ‘scale’ according to universal laws. Meaning, as something gets bigger, it grows less linearly along different axes, and this is a very predictable phenomenon. For example, an…”

“Genuinely one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, hands down. Speck explains why and how our cities started being designed first for cars, then for people, and why this is bad. Then he gives us 10 ways to change it, from increasing pedestrian safety, to fixing parking, to making the…”

“If you’ve read ‘Walkable City,’ I don’t know that there’s much new here, but it’s more approachable. There are 101 smaller ‘rules’ about how to fix cities and make them more friendly to pedestrians. It’s clearly geared to local politicians and city planners, but I am neither and I loved it. If you…”