Urban Design Indianapolis: Suggested Readings

SUGGESTED READINGS
There are some great books out there about urban design and building great neighborhoods and cities. We've tried to collect a few here. Most should be available at a local library, but we have links to purchase them all on amazon.com as well.
	Great Streets Which are the world's best streets, and what are the physical, designable characteristics that make them great? To answer these questions, Allan Jacobs has surveyed street users and design professionals and has studied a wide array of street types and urban spaces around the world. With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared.
	City Comforts The book shows examples of small things — City Comforts — that make urban life pleasant: places where people can meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art that infuses personality into locations and makes them into places. Many of these small details are so obvious as to be invisible.
	The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces In 1980, William H. Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world. This book is a must for anyone who is involved with design or review of open spaces. It shows how people use open space and identifies the common elements of successful spaces. While the elements all seem logical, the book shows how we often fly in the face of logic when using these spaces. The book focuses primarily on plazas and small parks in New York City, but includes a section for smaller cities with low rise buildings. The information can also be applied to parks in any size town. This book is a fascinating case study in social ecology.
	Place Making One of the hottest trends in real estate is the development of town centers and urban villages that include a mix of uses in a pedestrian friendly setting. This new book will help you navigate the unique development issues and options and show you how to make all of the elements work together. You will learn about the economic and social forces driving this trend; how these projects are being developed in master planned communities, infill, and redevelopment areas; special regulatory, market and finance issues; and how suburban planners and developers are pursuing town center concepts to create attractive gathering places for their communities. Illustrated in full color, the book includes case studies and examples that describe how leading professionals met the challenges and developed innovative and successful projects.
	Public Places - Urban Spaces Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.
	The Death and Life of Great American Cities A classic since its publication in 1961, this book is the definitive statement on American cities: what makes them safe, how they function, and why all too many official attempts at saving them have failed. In this ground-breaking work written over 30 years ago, Jane Jacobs not only threw a monkey wrench into conventional thinking on the structure of cities and helped reshape urban planning, but she did so as a non-expert and as a woman-both historical taboos in the world of intellectual analysis. With flowing, descriptive prose, Jane's work leads us to think about each element of a city-sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy-as a synergistic unit both encompassing structure and going beyond it to the functioning dynamics of our habitats. On a revealing journey through the problems of modern urban centers, artificially engineered to meet political and economic agendas, we arrive at a greater understanding of the intrinsic nature of our cities-as they should be.
	The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History will appeal especially to designers, architects, and planners, as it organizes its subject matter according to what form it takes (grids, diagrams, skylines, etc.) rather than chronologically, topically, or typologically, as do other surveys of urbanism. Kostof is a master tour guide, blessed with an easy writing style, a piquant, welcoming mind, and a worldwide mastery of his subject matter.
	Good City Form In the world of urban design, obsessed with spectacular novelty and superficial aesthetics, this ambitious and profound work of Kevin Lynch is refreshing, yet enduring. He suggests a theory of urban design based on fundamental human values and examines how such values lead to the notion of a "good city form". His performance dimensions (e.g. access, fit, vitality) are broad enough to be interpreted and re-interpreted for specific contexts and sites. And the appendix, which briefly summarizes other theories of city form, is a tour-de-force by itself. A masterpiece which deserves greater attention and consideration, especially by those under the illusion that urban design is more or less architecture writ large!
	Sustainable Urban Design This new text provides a coherent overview of the important issues in sustainable urban design. The writers focus on the physical aspects of the urban environment - the buildings and their engineering systems, landscaping, transport systems, energy, water and waste systems and successfully cover all the key elements in one volume together with fully illustrated examples of best practice. The contributors, drawn from architectural and planning practices, are recognized experts in this field.
	The Urban Design Handbook A comprehensive, beautifully designed guide to the complex process of urban design. From an important urban design and architecture firm comes this manual for urban designers, based on the firm's in-house practice and procedures. Covering the process from basic principles to developed design, this invaluable book can serve as an introductory course in urbanism as well as an operations handbook for architects, planners, developers, and public officials.
	Urban Villages Text describes the principles and process of creating attractive, socially diverse and economically sustainable mixed-use neighborhoods. British-oriented.