Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory

RECOMBINANT URBANISM

Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory

Recombinant Urbanism develops the urban–modeling techniques, first pioneered by Kevin Lynch, into a comprehensive framework for the fast–growing discipline of urban design. Covering the origins of urban design in North America and Europe, it discusses the main approaches that have evolved to deal with the fragmented contemporary city. It also looks at the influence of participatory planning processes, zoning codes, imagery, finance, and marketing on urban form. Shane describes how the very same forces at work behind the freedom of the individual have also led to a widespread urban dispersal. In the final chapters, Shane brings his argument up to date with an exciting and innovative vision of contemporary practice, in which urban actors combine urban elements in networked cities. While the urban–planning touchstones of pattern recognition, scaling, urban morphologies, and zoning codes remain at the fore, their role is stressed as a transient one. They are presented as ever–changing structures, subject to constant feedback and alteration by a changing cast of catalytic urban actors.

Providing a sophisticated and potent set of tools for urban designers and urban–design students, recombinant Urbanism also recasts urban modeling as an effective method of augmenting standard architectural design practices in an urban context.

Preface.

Introduction.

Chapter 1. What Is City Theory?

Chapter 2. What is Urban Design?

Chapter 3. Three Urban Elements.

Chapter 4. Heterotopias in City Modeling and Urban Design.

Conclusion: Heterotopias, the Net City, and Recombinant Urbanism.

Notes.

Photocredits.

Acknowledgements.

Index.

David Grahame Shane trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in the 1960s during the Archigram years. He completed an M.Arch in Urban Design and a Ph.D in Architectural and Urban History at Cornell University with Colin Rowe. He taught at the A.A. School under Alvin Boyarsky, before joining Columbia  University in 1985 (and the urban Design Program in 1991). Shane now also lectures at Cooper Union and City College in New York. Over the last 20 years, he has taught urban–design master classes and lectured internationally, as well as being published widely.

"...set to become the key textbook for Schools of Architecture and Urbanism in the UK and internationally..." ( Building Engineer, July 2005)

"...Shane′s book contributes handsomely to a broad understanding of the field..." (AA Files, 4th Oct 2005)

"...complex and exciting..."(Architectural Design, November 2005)

"This book offers a very useful history of ideas of urban design" (Urban Design, May 2006)