Category: New & Notable Acquisitions
Los Angeles & The Straphanger: Surviving The End Of The Automobile Age
A century of auto-oriented culture and bad city planning has left most of the country with transit that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as rising oil prices portend the end of the era of cheap energy, a remarkable revolution in transportation is underway. In Straphanger: Surviving The End Of The Automobile Age, author [...]
Los Angeles Isn’t Planned, It Just Happens, Right? Not So Fast!
“Call it ugly, call it beautiful, call it dysfunctional — but don’t call Los Angeles unplanned.” So begins a chapter titled “Challenging The Myth Of An Unplanned Los Angeles” in a new book out this week that you’ll definitely want to know about, if not read right away. Hot on the heels of the American [...]
Rethinking A Lot: The Design And Culture Of Parking
There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So, too, is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In Rethinking A Lot: The Design [...]
Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools For Creating Vibrant, Healthy, And Resilient Communities
The Great American Dream of cruising down the parkway, zipping from here to there at any time has given way to a true nightmare that is destroying the environment, costing billions and deeply impacting our personal well-being. Jeffrey Tumlin’s new book titled Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools For Creating Vibrant, Healthy, And Resilient Communities offers easy-to-understand, clearly explained [...]
Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America’s Metropolitan Geography
In our popular imagination, America is the land of wide-open spaces. But in reality, much of it is more densely populated than Europe. Two-thirds of the U.S. population lives on less than 20% of the privately owned land. With an expected population of 400 million by 2040, America is morphing into an economic system composed [...]
Regional Planning For A Sustainable America: How Creative Programs Are Promoting Prosperity And Saving The Environment
Carleton K. Montgomery’s Regional Planning for a Sustainable America is the first book to represent the great variety of today’s effective regional planning programs, analyzing dozens of regional initiatives across North America. The American landscape is being transformed by poorly designed, sprawling development. This sprawl — and its wasteful resource use, traffic, and pollution — [...]
High Line: The Inside Story Of New York City’s Park In The Sky
The High Line, a new park atop an elevated rail structure on Manhattan’s West Side, is among the most innovative urban reclamation projects in memory. The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one: two young citizens with no prior experience in planning and development collaborated with their neighbors, elected officials, artists, [...]
Urban Transformation Through Transit-Oriented Development And the Sustainable City: Hollywood & Highland And Pico / San Vicente
In the gorgeous new book titled Urban Transformation: Transit Oriented Development And The Sustainable City, authors Ronald A. Altoon and James C. Auld address the intersections of values, issues and priorities of public and private sector partners in creating positive civic outcomes through the creation of transit-oriented developments. With a long collaborative history of designing people-oriented [...]
No More Play: Conversations On Open Space And Urban Speculation In Los Angeles And Beyond
In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, American architect Michael Maltzan traces the transformations that have taken place in the city of Los Angeles since the early 1990s. This is a beautifully produced book full of intriguing insights — definitely worth a look. Through a series of conversations with the [...]
Grid / Street / Place: Essential Elements Of Sustainable Urban Districts
Today’s urban resident is seeking a more flexible, sustainable environment — representing a unique, diverse, vibrant and responsible way of living — as an alternative to the typical development patterns of suburban and semi-urban sprawl. Can urban design help create this type of sustainable urbanism? Nathan Cherry’s Grid / Street / Place: Essential Elements Of [...]
