Galen Cranz surveys the rise of the park system from 1850 to the present through 4 stages - the pleasure ground, the reform park, the recreation facility and the open space system.

Many designs that appear in today's society will circulate and encounter audiences of many different cultures and languages. With communication comes responsibility; are designers aware of the meaning and impact of their work? An image or symbol that is acceptable in one culture can be offensive or even harmful in the next. A typeface or colour in a design might appear to be neutral, but its meaning is always culturally dependent. If designers learn to be aware of global cultural contexts, we can avoid stereotyping and help improve mutual understanding between people. Politics of Design is a collection of visual examples from around the world. Using ideas from anthropology and sociology, it creates surprising and educational insight in contemporary visual communication. The examples relate to the daily practice of both online and offline visual communication: typography, images, colour, symbols, and information. Politics of Design shows the importance of visual literacy when communicating beyond borders and cultures. It explores the cultural meaning behind the symbols, maps, photography, typography, and colours that are used every day. It is a practical guide for design and communication professionals and students to create more effective and responsible visual communication.

For years American urban parks fell into decay due to disinvestment, but as cities began to rebound—and evidence of the economic, cultural, and health benefits of parks grew— investment in urban parks swelled. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands. Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks. The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.

Often portrayed as a confluence of cars and movies, this book traces another course to uncover Los Angeles’ primal sources of creation – land and opportunity. Within the endless sprawl there reside flurries of uncodified spatial configurations that no high-definition map or satellite image can accurately capture nor present. (IN)formal L.A. explores a range of unique spatial practices and pedagogies through the lens of politics in Los Angeles. While this book articulates growing skepticism in current design discourse and education, it also provides a spatial awareness that is culturally rooted, socially responsive and vitally connected to the city. Composed of essays, photos, projects and interviews, (IN)formal L.A. embraces the quirky, celebrates the wide and embellishes the close range to expose the complex social organizations within this contemporary urban network. (IN)formal L.A. serves as both a textbook for classes in art and architecture, urban design, planning and theory in addition to responding to the increasing interest in the study of Los Angeles by scholars in other fields. The book provides an extended overview of the range and variety of urban issues that are critical to understanding present-day Los Angeles. “As hard as it is to wrap the mind around the urban mosh pit known as Los Angeles, it is always comforting to think someone has given a knowing push toward deciphering its DNA. Victor Jones’s compilation of critical essays and native observations does just that. Every L.A. explorer needs a copy in his or her back pocket.” — Craig Hodgetts, partner of Hodgetts+Fung and professor of architecture, University of California, Los Angeles “What form will the contemporary city, with all its fugitive qualities, continue to take? This book, with Los Angeles as the backdrop, tackles the question head on, adding ideas and dimension that will be relevant to the debates concerning all emerging cities.” — Michael Maltzan, principal of MMA and architect of Innercity Arts, Los Angeles “The studio at the heart of this book, and the essays that circle around it, show how architectural practice and pedagogy can open up a space of possibility for more democratic and just forms of political life to emerge if we are willing to embrace and build upon their fragile yet persistent reverberations.” — Aron Vinegar, Director of Art History and Visual Culture, University of Exeter, UK and author of I AM A MONUMENT: On Learning from Las Vegas

A compendium on the history and development of subsidized housing in Europe of the twentieth century. Social housing has a long tradition in Europe. Since the early twentieth century, these often anonymously built and unappreciated structures have arisen all across the suburbs of Europe's major cities. In the multidisciplinary and international research project Mapping Public Housing, the Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Porto's Faculty of Architecture has been tracing the architectural heritage of social housing. The findings demonstrate that, in many cases, vibrant neighborhoods and entire city districts have emerged from such social housing programs. This book takes a closer look at exemplary developments in Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Spain. The case studies cover a wide range of social and historical contexts, from the beginnings of social housing in Portugal sparked by German investment during World War I to the propaganda policies associated with subsidized housing for the working class in the 1940s, and to sustainable concepts and ideas for the future. Hidden in Plain Sight offers a wide-ranging panorama that recognizes the development of subsidized residential construction as a part of Europe's cultural history and traces the important role that state-funded housing has played in the emergence of the European welfare state. A contemporary photo essay on a 1960s social housing complex in Lisbon rounds out this volume.

Explores the struggle to rebuild the site at Ground Zero, offering a social, political, cultural, and architectural history of the World Trade Center and the artistic, financial, and emotional challenges of creating a design for the site.

Battery Park City in Manhattan has been hailed as a triumph of urban design, and is considered to be one of the success stories of American urban redevelopment planning. The flood of praise for its design, however, can obscure the many lessons from the long struggle to develop the project. Nothing was built on the site for more than a decade after the first master plan was approved, and the redevelopment agency flirted with bankruptcy in 1979. Taking a practice-oriented approach, the book examines the role of planning and development agencies in implementing urban waterfront redevelopment. It focuses upon the experience of the central actor - the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) - and includes personal interviews with executives of the BPCA, former New York mayors John Lindsay and Ed Koch, key public officials, planners, and developers. Describing the political, financial, planning, and implementation issues faced by public agencies and private developers from 1962 to 1993, it is both a case study and history of one of the most ambitious examples of urban waterfront redevelopment.