City Building: Nine Planning Principles For The 21St Century

City Building: Nine Planning Principles For The 21St Century

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 toCity BuildingCities 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 createCity 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.Review"The principles are straightforward: Growing cities need to be accessible and diverse, with increased density but ample parkland. There's an abundance of real-world case studies, many of them drawn from SOM files. Among the local examples is the plan for a ferry-centered neighborhood on Treasure Island - and the failed 1980s effort to make downtown San Jose into a thriving destination, a plan that Kriken said was thwarted in part by the fact that the nearby airport kept height limits low and prevented the daytime population that vibrant downtowns need.`Cities need to be able to reinvent themselves,' Kriken writes. `They thus need the ability to define alternative futures, even radically different futures, without necessarily being disrespectful of the past.' It's a quiet call to arms - and one that doesn't always play so well in the author's hometown." --San Francisco Chronicle"The book presents the idea that 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. Without good planning cities can be places of pollution, overcrowdedness, and waste. 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." --andDesign Magazine"A new must-have for a new time." --Landezine, May 2, 2010About the AuthorJohn Lund Kriken is a consulting partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and an adjunct professor of urban design at the University of California, Berkeley.