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Earthquake Children
Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo
Janet Borland
Harvard University Press, 2020

Japan, as recent history has powerfully illustrated, is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries. Today it is also one of the best prepared to face such seismic risk. This was not always the case.

Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan’s infrastructure of resilience. Drawing from a rich collection of previously unexplored sources, Janet Borland vividly illustrates that Japan’s contemporary culture of disaster preparedness and its people’s ability to respond calmly in a time of emergency are the result of learned and practiced behaviors. She traces their roots to the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which killed over 100,000 people when it struck the Tokyo region.

Beyond providing new perspectives on Japan’s seismic past, the history of childhood, and everyday life in interwar Japan, Borland challenges the popular idea that Japanese people owe their resilience to some innate sense of calm under pressure. Tokyo’s traumatic experiences in 1923 convinced government officials, seismologists, teachers, physicians, and architects that Japan must better prepare for future disasters. Earthquake Children documents how children, schools, and education became the primary tools through which experts sought to build a disaster-prepared society and nation that would withstand nature’s furies.

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East Asia Modern
Shaping the Contemporary City
Peter G. Rowe
Reaktion Books, 2005
An exciting explosion of urban expansion is occurring in East Asia: cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are expanding at a prodigious rate and bringing widespread change to the region. Peter G. Rowe's East Asia Modern is a timely comparative analysis of urban growth in this rapidly evolving part of the globe.

A renowned scholar on East Asian architecture and urbanism, Peter G. Rowe examines how the unique modernizing process of East Asian cities can be most usefully understood. Rowe offers a historical assessment of the region, chronicling the cities' development over the last century and setting into context their individual paths toward becoming modern. Rowe explains what the modernizing process has meant for the cultural diffusion of predominantly Western ideas, how East Asian urban regions have developed a distinct type of modernity, and what lessons can be gleaned from the contemporary East Asian experience. Refuting many common misconceptions about contemporary East Asian life, East Asia Modern offers a readable critical assessment of life in modern East Asia while also pointing to possibilities for the future.
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East of East
The Making of Greater El Monte
Romeo Guzmán
Rutgers University Press, 2020
East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars. 
 
 
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Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs
Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley
Island Press, 2015
As world population grows, and more people move to cities and suburbs, they place greater stress on the operating system of our whole planet. But urbanization and increasing densities also present our best opportunity for improving sustainability, by transforming urban development into desirable, lower-carbon, compact and walkable communities and business centers.

Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley seek to demonstrate that a sustainable built and natural environment can be achieved through ecodesign, which integrates the practice of planning and urban design with environmental conservation, through normal business practices and the kinds of capital programs and regulations already in use in most communities. Ecodesign helps adapt the design of our built environment to both a changing climate and a rapidly growing world, creating more desirable places in the process.

In six comprehensively illustrated chapters, the authors explain ecodesign concepts, including the importance of preserving and restoring natural systems while also adapting to climate change; minimizing congestion on highways and at airports by making development more compact, and by making it easier to walk, cycle and take trains and mass transit; crafting and managing regulations to insure better placemaking and  fulfill consumer preferences, while incentivizing preferred practices; creating an inviting and environmentally responsible public realm from parks to streets to forgotten spaces; and finally how to implement these ecodesign concepts.          

Throughout the book, the ecodesign framework is demonstrated by innovative practices that are already underway or have been accomplished in many cities and suburbs—from Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm to False Creek North in Vancouver to Battery Park City in Manhattan, as well as many smaller-scale examples that can be adopted in any community. 

Ecodesign thinking is relevant to anyone who has a part in shaping or influencing the future of cities and suburbs – designers, public officials, and politicians.
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Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture
The Educational Legacy of Lewis Mumford and Ian McHarg
William J. Cohen
Temple University Press, 2019

Lewis Mumford, one of the most respected public intellectuals of the twentieth century, speaking at a conference on the future environments of North America, said, “In order to secure human survival we must transition from a technological culture to an ecological culture.” In Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture, William Cohen shows how Mumford’s conception of an educational philosophy was enacted by Mumford’s mentee, Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect and regional planner at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg advanced a new way to achieve an ecological culture―through an educational curriculum based on fusing ecohumanism to the planning and design disciplines. 

Cohen explores Mumford’s important vision of ecohumanism—a synthesis of natural systems ecology with the myriad dimensions of human systems, or human ecology―and how McHarg actually formulated and made that vision happen. He considers the emergence of alternative energy systems and new approaches to planning and community development to achieve these goals.

The ecohumanism graduate curriculum should become the basis to train the next generation of planners and designers to lead us into the ecological culture, thereby securing the educational legacy of both Lewis Mumford and Ian McHarg.

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The Ecological Design and Planning Reader
Forster O. Ndubisi
Island Press, 2014
From Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, writers have long examined the effects of industrialization and its potential to permanently alter the world around them. Today, as we experience rapid global urbanization, pressures on the natural environment to accommodate our daily needs for food, work, shelter, and recreation are greatly intensified. Concerted efforts to balance human use with ecological concerns are needed now more than ever.

A rich body of literature on the effect of human actions on the natural environment provides a window into what we now refer to as ecological design and planning. The study and practice of ecological design and planning provide a promising way to manage change in the landscape so that human actions are more in tune with natural processes. In The Ecological Design and Planning Reader Professor Ndubisi offers refreshing insights into key themes that shape the theory and practice of ecological design and planning. He has assembled, synthesized, and framed selected seminal published scholarly works in the field from the past one hundred and fifty years——ranging from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow to Anne Whiston Spirn’s, “Ecological Urbanism: A Framework for the Design of Resilient Cities.” The reader ends with a hopeful look forward, which suggests an agenda for future research and analysis in ecological design and planning.

This is the first volume to bring together classic and contemporary writings on the history, evolution, theory, methods, and exemplary practice of ecological design and planning. The collection provides students, scholars, researchers, and practitioners with a solid foundation for understanding the relationship between human systems and our natural environment.
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The Ecology of Place
Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community
Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning
Island Press, 1997

Current patterns of land use and development are at once socially, economically, and environmentally destructive. Sprawling low-density development literally devours natural landscapes while breeding a pervasive sense of social isolation and exacerbating a vast array of economic problems. As more and more counties begin to look more and more the same, hope for a different future may seem to be fading. But alternatives do exist.

The Ecology of Place, Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning describe a world in which land is consumed sparingly, cities and towns are vibrant and green, local economies thrive, and citizens work together to create places of eduring value. They present a holistic and compelling approach to repairing and enhancing communities, introducing a vision of "sustainable places" that extends beyond traditional architecture and urban design to consider not just the physical layout of a development but the broad set of ways in which communities are organized and operate. Chapters examine:

  • the history and context of current land use problems, along with the concept of "sustainable places"
  • the ecology of place and ecological policies and actions
  • local and regional economic development
  • links between land-use and community planning and civic involvement
  • specific recommendations to help move toward sustainability

The authors address a variety of policy and development issues that affect a community -- from its economic base to its transit options to the ways in which its streets and public spaces are managed -- and examine the wide range of programs, policies, and creative ideas that can be used to turn the vision of sustainable places into reality.

The Ecology of Place is a timely resource for planners, economic development specialists, students, and citizen activists working toward establishing healthier and more sustainable patterns of growth and development.

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Emerging Civic Urbanisms in Asia
Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei beyond Developmental Urbanization
Im Sik Cho
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
In parts of Asia, citizens are increasingly involved in shaping their neighbourhoods and cities, representing a significant departure from earlier state-led or market-driven urban development. These emerging civic urbanisms are a result of an evolving relationship between the state and civil society. The contributions in this volume provide critical insights into how the changing state–civil society relationship affects the recent surge of civic urbanism in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei, and the authors present eighteen cases of grassroots activism and resistance, collaboration and placemaking, neighbourhood community building, and self-organization and commoning in these cities. Exploring how citizen participation and state–civil society partnerships contribute to more resilient and participatory neighbourhoods and cities, the authors use the concept of civic urbanisms not only as a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing social and urban change but as an aspirational model of urban governance for cities in Asia and beyond.
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Empathic Design
Perspectives on Creating Inclusive Spaces
Edited by Elgin Cleckley
Island Press, 2024
How do you experience a public space? Do you feel safe? Seen? Represented? The response to these questions may differ based on factors including your race, age, ethnicity, or gender identity. In the architecture and design professions, decisions about the articulation of public spaces and who may be honored in them have often been made by white men. How do designers rethink design processes to produce works that hold space for the diversity of people using them?
 
In Empathic Design, designer and architecture professor Elgin Cleckley brings together leaders and visionary practitioners in architecture, urban design, planning, and design activism to help explore these questions. Cleckley explains that empathic designers need to approach design as iterative, changing, and shifting to say, “we see you”, “we hear you”. Part of an emerging design framework, empathic designers work with and in the communities affected. They acknowledge the full history of a place and approach the lived experience and memories of those in the community with respect.
 
Early chapters explore broader conceptual approaches, proposing definitions of empathy in the context of design, disrupting colonial narratives, and making space for grief. Other chapters highlight specific design projects, including the Harriet Tubman Memorial in Newark, The Camp Barker Memorial in Washington, D.C.,  the Freedom Center in Oklahoma City, and the Charlottesville Memorial for Peace and Justice.
 
Empathic Design provides essential approaches and methods from multiple perspectives, meeting the needs of our time and holding space for readers to find themselves. 
 
 
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The End of Automobile Dependence
How Cities are Moving Beyond Car-Based Planning
Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy
Island Press, 2015
Cities will continue to accommodate the automobile, but when cities are built around them, the quality of human and natural life declines. Current trends show great promise for future urban mobility systems that enable freedom and connection, but not dependence. We are experiencing the phenomenon of peak car use in many global cities at the same time that urban rail is thriving, central cities are revitalizing, and suburban sprawl is reversing. Walking and cycling are growing in many cities, along with ubiquitous bike sharing schemes, which have contributed to new investment and vitality in central cities including Melbourne, Seattle, Chicago, and New York.
 
We are thus in a new era that has come much faster than global transportation experts Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy had predicted: the end of automobile dependence. In The End of Automobile Dependence, Newman and Kenworthy look at how we can accelerate a planning approach to designing urban environments that can function reliably and conveniently on alternative modes, with a refined and more civilized automobile playing a very much reduced and manageable role in urban transportation. The authors examine the rise and fall of automobile dependence using updated data on 44 global cities to better understand how to facilitate and guide cities to the most productive and sustainable outcomes.
 
This is the final volume in a trilogy by Newman and Kenworthy on automobile dependence (Cities and Automobile Dependence in 1989 and Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence in 1999). Like all good trilogies this one shows the rise of an empire, in this case that of the automobile, the peak of its power, and the decline of that empire.
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Engaged Urban Pedagogy
Participatory Practices in Planning and Place-Making
Edited by Lucy Natarajan and Michael Short
University College London, 2023
A practical handbook for teaching about the built environment.
 
Engaged Urban Pedagogy presents a participatory approach to teaching about the built environment by exploring twelve examples of real-world engagement in urban planning involving people within, and beyond, the university. Starting with curriculum review, course content is analyzed in light of urban pasts, race, queer identity, lived experiences, and the concerns of urban professionals. Case studies then shift to focus on techniques for participatory critical pedagogy, including expanding the classroom with links to live place-making processes, connections made through digital co-design exercises, and student-led podcasting assignments. Finally, the book turns to activities beyond formal university teaching, such as those where school-age children learn about their own participation in urban processes together alongside university students and researchers. Drawing on foundational works of critical pedagogy, the contributors present a distinctly urban praxis that will help those in universities respond to the built environment challenges of today.
 
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Environmental Land Use Planning and Management
John Randolph
Island Press, 2003

Environmental Land Use Planning and Management is a unique new textbook that presents a diverse, comprehensive, and coordinated approach to issues of land use planning and management and their impacts on the environment. It builds on recent advances in environmental science, engineering, and geospatial information technologies to provide students with the scientific foundation they need to understand both natural land systems and engineering approaches that can mitigate impacts of land use practices. While offering a base of knowledge in planning theory and natural science, its primary emphasis is on describing and explaining emerging approaches, methods, and techniques for environmental land use planning, design, and policy.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Environmental Land Use Management," introduces broad concepts of environmental planning and describes management approaches. Those approaches include collaborative environmental management, land conservation, environmental design, government land use management, natural hazard mitigation, and ecosystem and watershed management. Part II, "Environmental Land Use Principles and Planning Analysis," focuses on land analysis methods, such as geospatial data and geographic information systems (GIS); soils and slope analysis; assessment of stormwater quantity and quality; land use and groundwater protection; ecological assessment for vegetation, wetlands, and habitats; and integrated analytical techniques like land suitability analysis, carrying capacity studies, and environmental impact assessment.

Environmental Land Use Planning and Managementoffers a unique interdisciplinary perspective with an emphasis on application. It is an important new text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental planning, landscape architecture, geography, environmental studies, and natural resource management, and a valuable resource for professionals and others concerned with issues of environmental planning and land use.

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Environmental Land Use Planning and Management
Second Edition
John Randolph
Island Press, 2011
Since the first publication of this landmark textbook in 2004, it has received high praise for its clear, comprehensive, and practical approach.  The second edition continues to offer a unique framework for teaching and learning interdisciplinary environmental planning, incorporating the latest thinking, newest research findings, and numerous, updated case studies into the solid foundation of the first edition.

The book has been reorganized based on feedback from instructors, and contains a new chapter entitled "Land Use, Energy, Air Quality and Climate Change." Throughout, boxes have been added on such topics as federal laws, state and local environmental programs, and critical problems and responses.

This new edition addresses three broad subject areas. Part I, "Environmental Planning and Management," provides an overview of the field, along with the fundamentals of land use planning, and presents a collaborative approach to environmental planning. Part II, "Sustainable Land Use Principles and Planning Analysis," considers environmental and geospatial information; soils, topography, and land use; stream flow, flooding, and runoff; stormwater management and stream restoration; groundwater hydrology; landscape ecology; wildlife habitats and biodiversity; energy, air quality and climate change; and methods for land analysis. Part III, "Managing Watersheds, Ecosystems and Development to Achieve Sustainable Communities," explains the principles of ecosystem management, restoration, and protection; land conservation; and the mitigation of natural hazards.

With this thoroughly revised second edition, Environmental Land Use Planning and Management maintains its preeminence as the leading textbook in its field.
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front cover of Environmental Regulations and Housing Costs
Environmental Regulations and Housing Costs
Arthur C. Nelson, John Randolph, Joseph M. Schilling, Jonathan Logan, James M. McElfish, Jr., and Newport Partners LLC
Island Press, 2009
Many communities across the nation still lack affordable housing. And many officials continue to claim that “affordable housing” is an oxymoron. Building inexpensively is impossible, they say, because there are too many regulations. Required environmental impact statements and habitat protection laws, they contend, drive up the costs of construction. But is this actually true? In a comprehensive study of the question, the authors of this eye-opening book separate fact from myth.
With admirable clarity, they describe the policy debate from its beginning, review the economic theory, trace the evolution of development regulation, and summarize the major research on the topic. In addition, they offer their own research, accompanied by a case study of two strikingly different Washington, D.C., suburbs. They also include results of focus groups conducted in Dallas, Denver, and Tucson. The authors find that environmental regulatory costs—as a share of total costs and processes—are about the same now as they were thirty years ago, even though there are far more regulations today. They find, too, that environmental regulations may actually create benefits that could improve the value of housing.
Although they conclude that regulations do not appear to drive up housing costs more now than in the past, they do offer recommendations of ways in which the processes associated with regulations—including review procedures—could be improved and could result in cost savings. Intended primarily for professionals who are involved in, or impacted by, regulations—from public officials, planners, and engineers to housing developers and community activists—this book will provide useful insights and data to anyone who wants to know if (and how) American housing can actually be made “affordable.”
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The Essential Ian McHarg
Writings on Design and Nature
Ian L. McHarg; Edited by Frederick R. Steiner
Island Press, 2006

The Essential Ian McHarg brings together a series of short essays that reveal the full range of Ian McHarg's thoughts on design and nature. Adapted from the comprehensive book of his work, To Heal the Earth, these carefully selected essays provide an ideal reader for undergraduate and graduate students in planning and landscape architecture.

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Eugenics in the Garden
Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity
By Fabiola López-Durán
University of Texas Press, 2018

Winner, Robert Motherwell Book Award, Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts, The Dedalus Foundation, 2019

As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress.

Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the new Latin world. Journeying back and forth between France, Brazil, and Argentina, Fabiola López-Durán uncovers the complicity of physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by the authority of science. In doing so, she reveals the ideological trajectory of one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, who deployed architecture in what he saw as the perfecting and whitening of man. The first in-depth interrogation of eugenics’ influence on the construction of the modern built environment, Eugenics in the Garden convincingly demonstrates that race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and that racism was, and remains, an ideology of progress.

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Everyday Streets
Inclusive Approaches to Understanding and Designing Streets
Edited by Agustina Martire, Birgit Hausleitner, and Jane Clossick
University College London, 2023
A comparative look at everyday streets in contemporary cities and how they could be more inclusively used.

Everyday streets are both the most used and most undervalued of cities’ public spaces. They are places of social aggregation, bringing together people of different classes, genders, ages, ethnicities, and nationalities. They comprise not just the familiar outdoor spaces that we move through and interact in but also urban blocks, interiors, depths, and hinterlands, which are integral to streets’ nature and contribute to their vitality. Everyday Streets offers an inclusive approach to understanding and designing these streets through an analysis of them as found in cities around the globe. From the regular rectilinear urban blocks of Montreal to the carefully regulated narrow alleyways of Naples, and from the resilient market streets of London to the crammed commercial streets of Chennai, the streets in this book were all conceived with a certain level of control. Everyday Streets is a palimpsest of methods, perspectives, and recommendations that together provide a solid understanding of everyday streets, their degree of inclusiveness, and to what extent they could be more inclusive.
 
 
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Exploring the Architecture of Place in America’s Farmers Markets
Kathryn Clarke Albright
University of Cincinnati Press, 2020
Exploring the Architecture of Place in America's Farmers Markets explores the elusive architectural states of these beloved community-gathering places. From classic market buildings such as Findlay Market in Cincinnati, to open-air pavilions in Durham North Carolina and pop-up canopy markets in Staunton, Virginia, the country currently has over 8,700 seasonal and year-round farmers markets.

Architect, teacher, and founder of the Friends of the Farmers Market, Katheryn Clarke Albright combines historically informed architectural observation with interview material and images drawn from conversations with farmers, vendors, market managers and shoppers.

Using eight scales of interaction and interface, Albright presents in-depth case studies to demonstrate how architectural elements and spatial conditions foster social and economic exchange between vendors, shoppers, and the community at large. Albright looks ahead to an emerging typology—the mobile market—bringing local farmers and healthy foods to underserved neighborhoods.

The impact farmers markets make on their local communities inspires place-making, improves the local economy, and preserves rural livelihoods.  Developed organically and distinctively out of the space they occupy, these markets create and revitalize communities as rich as the produce they sell.

 
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