Urban studies and planning terminology

Whyte has a very different approach than these two described so far. Whyte only extrapolated conclusions from evidence based on non-objective observations. He would set up time-lapse cameras to track the movement and patterns occurring in a plaza or urban space. He could then determine the popular areas where certain groups of people would congregate, and the time it would normally take place. For example, in the case of the city plaza, people tended to stay in direct sunlight on fair weather…

Cities Make Us Smarter Triumph of the City, written by Edward Glaeser, dives into the topic of cities and how they have transformed and shaped our lives. Plastered across the cover reads, “How our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier”. Glaeser provides fantastic insights into each of these adjectives, but one stands apart from the rest. Cities make us smarter. Glaeser makes this clear when he states in the introduction, “Cities, the dense agglomerations…

titled, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs”, she gently and respectively rejects the perception of suburbia that most of American’s hold in their minds today. Inside this book, “The New Suburban History”, Nicolaides explains why the great urban scholars and writers of the 1950’s and 1960’s painted the wrong picture of the “hell” suburbia was and is seen today. Her opinion may be difficult to undercover in the beginning of her piece due to her mostly positive regard to Louis Wirth,…

Big buildings ignore the context around them; they are independent of the surrounding fabric they are meant to tie into, becoming objects that merely hover in space. The sudden appearance of these big buildings diminishes the aspects of quality and experience causing the concept of architecture to be rethought. Their distant relationship with the ground, due to technological advances such as the elevator, creates an inwardly focused space. The building only continues to grow taller, allowing…

The final case study is about urban development in Davis, California. Urban development does not take place in a vacuum, and it is important to be sure that established assumptions about the development process are manifestly accurate. Property developers usually have their way, large corporations do homogenise the American landscape with indistinguishable retail outlets, and entrepreneurs, landowners, mainstream media, and local government also support this type of growth. In other words, what…

research on this project and experiences on similar projects, a series of downtown issues were identified as well as opportunities and approaches for strengthening downtown’s network of streets and public spaces. 1 Key Issue: Urban Structure Challenges: A city’s urban structure is comprised of its places and their connections; the neighborhoods, focal points and districts which act as destinations within the city and the streets, corridors and open space networks that organize them.…

Parker Hargett Professor Hagen Sustainable cities 13 October 2015 New York city The city that I decided to write about for this assignment is New York City. The reason that I decided to choose this city was because of the interesting historic events that have happened in the city of New York and how it has come to one of the most thriving cities that is also the culture capital of the United States. New york officially did not get its name until the 18th century when the British seized…

Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis is a book written by Greg Hise in 1997. This book challenges the notion that Los Angeles lacked planning and order when being created. Many people believe Los Angeles is the result of random dispersion and housing. Magnetic Los Angeles studies the many ways Los Angeles was, in fact, created through planning and industry. There are numerous reasons that factored into Hise’s conclusion, and he states at the end of the book, “In this study I have…

If you look around, you notice grids are used everywhere in day-to-day life. For example, the keyboard on your laptop, the pixelated squares on your TV screen, and the apps on your IPhone all consist of grids. In the article Grids, Rosalind Krauss discusses the significance of grids in artwork, specifically in modern art. Krauss describes grids as the “modernity of modern art” and examines the impact behind the grid’s centrifugal and centripetal existence. There are two ways in which Krauss…

this started in this area. It is a great idea for everyone involved. It makes the city more appealing to people who are looking into moving back into the downtown area of our city. This worked in downtown Detroit. It has turned the landscape into urban agriculture across the city. Besides growing food for the community, it helps people to learn, teach and spend time together. By doing this people of the community can develop a closer relationship with each other. They would look out for one…