Reinventing The Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility For The 21st Century provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era.
The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned sedans of fifty years ago.
In the 21st century, cars are still made for 20th century purposes. They’re well-suited for conveying multiple passengers over long distances at high speeds, but inefficient for providing personal mobility within cities where most of the world’s people now live.
In this pathbreaking book, author William Mitchell and two industry experts reimagine the automobile, describing vehicles of the near future that are green, smart, connected, and fun to drive.
They roll out four big ideas that will make this both feasible and timely.
First, we must transform the DNA of the automobile, basing it on electric-drive and wireless communication rather than petroleum, the internal combustion engine and stand-alone operation.
Second, automobiles need to be linked by a Mobility Internet that allows them to collect and share data on traffic conditions, intelligently coordinate their movements, and keep drivers connected to their social networks.
Third, automobiles must be recharged through a convenient, cost-effective infrastructure that is integrated with smart electric grids and makes increasing use of renewable energy sources.
Finally, dynamically priced markets for electricity, road space, parking space and shared-use vehicles must be introduced to provide optimum management of urban mobility and energy stystems.
Building on the success of its first edition, the second edition of The Sustainable Urban Development Reader expands its selections of classic material on sustainable community development.
As in the previous edition, it begins by tracking the roots of the sustainable development concept in the 19th and 20th centuries, before presenting classic readings on a number of dimensions of the sustainability concept.
Topics covered include land use and urban design, transportation, ecological planning and restoration, energy and materials use, economic development, social and environmental justice, and green architecture and building.
All selections include a concise editorial introduction that place the selection in context and suggest further reading. Additional sections cover tools for sustainable development, visions of sustainable community and case studies from around the world.
This anthology includes substantially updated material on:
- global warming
- issues in less-developed countries
- ecotourism
- prospects for sustainable development in China
- “megacities”
It also contains educational exercises for individuals as well as university classes or community groups as well as an extensive list of recommended readings.
Featuring projects that have won The American Institute of Architects’ National Honor Awards for Urban Design in recent years, Urban Design For An Urban Century: Placemaking For People is a comprehensive book of tools and information on urban design.
This unique guide provides urban designers, architects and students with contemporary urban design paradigms and principles, processes and design tools for various project types and scales, such as downtowns, neighborhoods, Main Street revitalization, waterfronts and college campuses.
Robert Campbell, Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe architecture critic calls this work “The wisest, clearest introduction to the art and science of designing cities” while Planetizen offers up a more balanced and thorough review.