Urban Planning Blog

One in every ten people lived in urban areas a century ago. Now, for the first time ever, most people live in cities. By 2050, the United Nations projects, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will call urban areas home. The majority of this growth is centered in struggling, developing countries of the Global South, but cities in developed (or Global North) countries face increasingly complex challenges as well.

To help manage and plan for this accelerating urbanization, the Rockefeller Foundation convened an exceptional group of urbanists–leading policy makers and government officials, finance experts, urban researchers, members of civil society organizations, and other innovators–for a Global Urban Summit at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This book shares their diverse perspectives, creative approaches, and urgent agenda for harnessing the vast opportunities of urbanization for a better world.

Order this book free.

Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett, the editors of “The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), will be taking questions. You may have to read the book first though. It seems to be an interesting read and right up my research alley too.

Update: The answers are up now.

I am a self-professed critic of sprawl development which unfortunately isn’t saying much because any urban planner especially in this new age of planning is exactly that. Yet we see sprawling sub-divisions crop up everywhere around us and chances are that we will end up living in one of these cookie-cutter homes that we so love to hate. Call it trying to do the best thing for your children or just finding a good deal on your investment dollars, we see that in spite of the growing criticism of sub-division development, it continues to flourish. So are we just trapped in our ivory tower while the common people go about making the perfectly rational choice?

Witold Rybczynski, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and the acclaimed author of Home and A Clearing in a Distance tackles this paradox in a subtle narrative of his experiences of a new development in his latest book, Last Harvest – How a Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and why we live in Houses Anyway. If the title and the subtitle hasn’t tired you, I’m sure it certainly has piqued your interest. Simon and Schuster was kind enough to send me a review copy because the conflict of promoting new urbanism in the face of persistent popular choice for regular homes has always been a subject of interest for me. Rybczynski takes us along on the slow path of a real-life development of a residential sub-division in rural Pennsylvania called New Daleville. Located on a former cornfield, New Daleville was conceptualized by its developers as a neotraditional development, complete with homes built close to each other to encourage a sense of intimacy and community.

Rybczynski assumes the role of a bystander as he witnesses the often slow-moving process of real estate development that is often fraught with bureaucratic redtape and technical limitations. However, at no point do we sense a feeling of hopelessness or exasperation with the process but instead reveal in the everyday process of getting things done in the real world. At one point in the book, Rybczynski shares an incident regarding disposal of treated waste water and how an unexpected change in plans requires working around a sub-optimal solution that would inordinately delay the project. As students in architecture or land development school, we often tend to overlook such petty details but in the real world, they often tend to be the biggest obstacles in getting the work done.

The underlying theme of the book is utilizing and remaining true to the form of neotraditional development. We read plenty of background literature on the development of New Urbanism and Celebration and Seaside, Florida make repeated appearances in the narrative. While arguing for a different perspective in our living, Rybczynski does not shy away from emphasizing the decisions of owning a home and even having larger bathrooms as perfectly in line with our real-world needs. Rybczynski underlines the fact that new residential development although encroaching on natural agricultural land need not resort to unoriginal cookie-cutter homes that we have come to hate. Customized home building that emphasizes on architectural treatment of facades gives as much importance to the exterior as it lends a subtle yet strong complementary effect on the neighborhood. This effect on the community is not lost on the developers who are not only selling a house but are also looking to create a community that blends in with the rest of the town.

Overall, I quite liked the book. It was an easy and refreshing read quite different from overbearing polemics that often chastise us for giving in to our selfish need and indulging in sprawl-encouraging homes. Rybczynski’s book gives us an insight into how the developers understand this growing need for neotraditional development and highlights their efforts through this engaging anecdotal read.

Just when we thought that the nature of our urban spaces has been altered by the changing forms of economy and technology, the manufacturing-based cities make a comeback. In the previous half-century, we moved from a manufacturing-based economy to services-based economy thus altering the form of our cities from being centralized to being disperse. No longer was a single industry the major employer and the working class didn’t necessarily have to live near their place of employment as commuting to work became easier. This held true even in developing economies until of course, China took over the mantle of being the world’s manufacturer. Of course, manufacturing never died as someone has to manufacture the countless goods that we desire; it simply moved to places where it was more affordable to do so.

[source]. Edward Burtynsky recently released his pithily-named book, China that contains several photographs like the one above that depict the vast manufacturing industry in China. The mass employment pattern of such industries have spawned townships that are akin to manufacturing towns that dotted the Rust Belt in the United States in the earlier part of last century. Almost all workers are employed by a single industry and work and live together in high rise apartments. Characterized by long working hours, most workers either have no need for activities apart from work or aren’t given opportunity to indulge in any such activity. The other day I was talking with my significant other regarding the proclivity of having acquaintances and friends outside of our working environment and if lack of such options would have any detrimental effect on our lives. It looks like these workers simply don’t have the luxury of such options. The images of the workers housing as shown below are indicative of their work-centric lives:

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The ever-excellent BLDGBLOG will soon be in print format.

Geoff Manaugh says the book will be divided up into three major sections – Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, and Landscape Futures covering diverse topics like “plate tectonics and J.G. Ballard to geomagnetic harddrives and undiscovered Manhattan bedrooms, via offshore oil derricks, airborne utopias, wind power, fossil cities, statue disease, inflatable cathedrals, diamond mines, science fiction and the city, pedestrianization schemes, the architecture of the near-death experience,”…and more.

It definitely should be a fun read.

Holiday season is almost upon us and it is time to get cozy with the books. Here are the top 10 Planning books for this year (click on image to buy) as ranked by Planetizen:

Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America
By Alan Berger
Princeton Architectural Press, 256 pagesBuy this book

Green Cities: Urban Growth And the Environment
By Matthew Kahn
Brookings Institution Press, 160 pagesBuy this book

How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier, and Get More Mileage Out of Life
By Chris Balish
Ten Speed Press, 216 pages

Buy this book

Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary
By Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Rutgers University Press, 231 pagesBuy this book

Planet of Slums
By Mike Davis
Verso, 256 pages

Buy this book

Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter
University of Pennsylvania Press, 400 pages Buy this book

Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads
Edited by Gabriel Roth
Transaction Publishers, 581 pages Buy this book

The Suburb Reader
Edited by Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese
Routledge, 552 pages Buy this book

There Goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up
By Lance Freeman
Temple University Press, 248 pages Buy this book

This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America
By Anthony Flint
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 310 pages Buy this book

I must remember to get this book – Principles of Urban Structures – once I return from India. Blurb from the back cover: “This book explains how cities actually work. It will serve as a guide and inspiration for planners to re-humanize our cities using the latest technologies and recent understanding from science and mathematics.” Natural History of Vacant Lots seems like an interesting read too.