New Book Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns
Hoboken, NJ (PRWEB) January 27, 2014 -- In Street Design, Dover and Massengale share insights on how good street design can unlock economic value, increase happiness, improve health and reknit neighborhoods. America is undergoing a revolution in “Complete Streets” with over 600 jurisdictions that have adopted complete streets as a policy. Communities are demanding beautiful streets where people want to be, and this book is a blueprint for how to meet that demand.
Written by two accomplished architects and urban designers, this user-friendly street design manual looks at hundreds of streets old and new, shows us what works and what doesn't, and reveals the secrets behind designing beautiful streets and walkable places. Massengale and Dover know how to fix America's neighborhoods, cities, and towns: make them walkable again. That begins with great streets where people want to be, where they feel comfortable, safe, and charmed by their surroundings.
Street Design is the essential handbook for urban designers, civic leaders, architects, city planners, engineers, developers, landscape architects, and community activists; it is ideal reading for any person who wants to make their community walkable and create memorable streets that are not just routes to someplace else, but great places that are destinations in themselves.
This useful and transformative guide:
•Offers instruction on how to design new streets and improve existing ones to create more walkable cities and towns
•Shows examples of more than 150 excellent historic streets, retrofitted streets, and new streets, and explains why they are successful and how they were designed and created
•Highlights common street-design challenges and ways they can be addressed through placemaking
•Includes strategies for shaping space in the public right-of-way through correct building height to street width ratios, terminated vistas, landscaping, and street geometry
•Features more than 500 color and black-and-white photos and 32 pages of color plates
•Includes afterword by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere
•Incorporates guest essays from 20 of the leading thinkers in the field, including Kaid Benfield, David Brussat, Javier Cenicacelaya, Hank Dittmar, Andres Duany, Douglas Duany, Emily Glavey, Chip Kaufman, Ethan Kent, Marieanne Khoury-Vogt, Léon Krier, Gianni Longo, Thomas Low, Laura Lyon, Chuck Marohn, Paul Murrain, John Norquist, Stefanos Polyzoides, Gabriele Tagliaventi and Erik Vogt.
About the authors:
John Montague Massengale, AIA, is an architect and urban designer in New York City. He is a board member of the CNU, which has been called “the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post–Cold War era” and a former Director of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. With Robert A. M. Stern, he was coauthor of New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890–1915 and The Anglo-American Suburb.
Victor Dover, FAICP, is cofounder of Dover, Kohl & Partners Town Planning based in Coral Gables, Fla., a design practice focused on restoring healthy neighborhoods as the basis for sound communities and regions. He is former national chair of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) and lead designer of more than 150 neighborhoods, urban revitalization programs, and regional plans across the United States and abroad.
Publish date: January 27, 2014
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN-10: 1118066707
ISBN-13: 978-1-118-06670-6
Price: $85.00
Pages: 448 pages
Images: 547, with 53 of those in color
Cover: Hardcover
Trim Size: 9.1 x 7.9 x 1.2 inches
Web sites: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118066707.html and http://www.streets-book.com/
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-118-41859-8, 416 pages, $59.99
Advance Praise for Street Design:
“We are going to start walking around the places we live again, and as that occurs and becomes normal, we will rapidly redevelop a demand for higher quality in building at the human scale.”
—From the Afterword by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere
“Street Design is a lucid, practical and altogether indispensable guide for envisioning and creating vibrant 21st century towns and cities. It should be required reading for every local political leader, planner, architect, real estate developer and engaged urban citizen in America.”
—Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 and author of True Believers
“This book could change the way people see the streets in their towns and cities. And it could help those towns and cities make streets for people, rather than their cars.”
—Mayor Joe Riley, Charleston, South Carolina
Mike Onorato, Wiley, http://www.wiley.com, +1 201-748-6361, [email protected]
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