City Building: Nine Planning Principles for the 21st Century

by Kriken, John Lund; Enquist, Philip; Rapaport, Richard

• ISBN13: 9781568988818
• ISBN10: 1568988818
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-03-03
• Publisher: HACHETTE

Summary

Good city building is not created by complex statistics, functional problem solving, or any particular decision-making process. Successful cities instead come from people advocating easily understood human values and principles that take into account the sensory, tactile, and sustainable qualities of environment and design in relation to what is the best of human endeavor. -From the introduction to City Building Cities are often viewed as the least-healthy environments for humans because they are centers of pollution, overcrowdedness, and waste. But the opposite can be true. A well-planned city can be a model of sustainable living. Good city building counters the sprawl of suburbia with concentrated land use, replaces globalized design with regionally appropriate building types, and allows for livable, desirable neighborhoods. John Lund Kriken and Philip Enquist, both longtime partners in the preeminent and award-winning planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) have collaborated with writer Richard Rapaport to create City Building . This proactive, green-focused, user-friendly guide to city building is organized into three parts: Part one examines the past and defines the current practice of city building, addressing its shortcomings and proposing a comprehensive framework for rethinking the approach to cities in the future. Part two translates this framework into nine best-practice principles that are common to successful, livable, urban environments: sustainability, accessibility, diversity, open space, compatibility, incentives, adaptability, density, and identity. These principles are illustrated in a global portfolio of city building projects, designed by SOM, that show how best practices have been applied successfully. Part three makes the case that, far from being the problem, cities, properly organized, can be a mechanism for sensible, sustainable uses of increasingly scarce resources. The book concludes with a call for a national planning process and a comprehensive framework for settlement.

Author Biography

John Lund Kriken is a consulting partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and an adjunct professor of urban design at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
An Introduction to City Building
The Millennial City	p. 1
The Missing Elements of City Design	p. 4
A Brief (and Personal) History of Urban Design Theory and Practice	p. 9
The Role of Design in Today's City Building	p. 14
Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building
Introduction	p. 27
Sustainability	p. 28
Committing to an Environmental Ethic
Creating a Framework for Sustainable Settlement	p. 32
Choosing the Right Future	p. 37
Expanding a City/Sustaining Green	p. 44
Guiding a Nation to a Post-Petroleum Future	p. 50
Accessibility	p. 56
Facilitating Ease of Movement
Locating Corridors to Preserve a Downtown	p. 63
Creating Essential Access to Major Development	p. 66
Planning for Ferry Transit	p. 71
Learning from Mistakes: Mixed-Access Streets versus Transit Malls	p. 76
Unblocking Movement	p. 80
Restoring Access, Reversing Vacancy and Decline	p. 83
Diversity	p. 88
Maintaining Variety and Choice
Bringing Diversity to the Capitol	p. 93
Designing Diversity into City Expansion	p. 96
Creating Variety within Uniform Residential Regulations	p. 101
Identifying the Special Qualities of a Place	p. 104
Building-in Diversity	p. 108
Open Space	p. 112
Regenerating Natural Systems to Make Cities Green
Greening the World's Densest City	p. 118
Unpaving a River	p. 121
Topping Off the Burnham Plan with a Green Roof	p. 125
Developing a Public Greenbelt and Shoreline	p. 130
Compatibility	p. 134
Maintaining Harmony and Balance
Protecting Heritage While Creating Identity	p. 140
Protecting Heritage While Managing Density	p. 144
Retaining a Rural Landscape	p. 147
Reviving Block Patterns and Building Types	p. 149
Incentives	p. 152
Renewing Declining Cities/Rebuilding Brownfields
Restoring a River (and Regenerating a City)	p. 156
Rebuilding Downtowns in a Suburban Context: Good Intentions Get Snagged	p. 161
Incentivizing a Brownfield	p. 164
Adaptability	p. 168
Facilitating "Wholeness" and Positive Change
Planning for Continuous Change	p. 175
Guiding and Anticipating Growth with Principles	p. 178
Recovering a Diamond in the Rust (Belt)	p. 183
Fitting Inside with Outside	p. 187
Working toward a Flexible Campus	p. 190
Density	p. 192
Designing Compact Cities with Appropriate Transit
Using Brown, Saving Green: Urban Density for Regional Renewal	p. 195
Accepting Density and Height	p. 202
Taking Advantage of Existing Infrastructure	p. 206
Identity	p. 210
Creating/Preserving a Unique and Memorable Sense of Place
Developing Identity in Response to Climate	p. 219
Responding to Climate and Culture	p. 225
Creating a New Downtown Identity	p. 230
Harnessing the Potential of the Waterfront	p. 234
The City of the Future/The Future of the City
The City Is the Solution (Not the Problem)	p. 239
A New Urban Model	p. 239
A Developmental Moore's Law	p. 240
Learning from Asia	p. 240
The Need for a Framework for Settlement	p. 241
Refocusing Planning Theory and Practice	p. 245
Rethinking Single-Purpose Design Education and Problem Solving	p. 245
A Call for National Plans	p. 246
Conclusion	p. 246
Project Credits	p. 247
Index	p. 254
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