Until the 1980s, Vancouver was a typical mid-sized North American city. But after the city hosted Expo 86, something extraordinary happened. This otherwise unremarkable urban centre was transformed into an inspiring world-class city celebrated for its livability, sustainability, and competitiveness. This book tells the story of the urban planning phenomenon called “Vancouverism” and the philosophy and practice behind it. Writing from an insider’s perspective, Larry Beasley, a former chief planner of Vancouver, traces the principles that inspired Vancouverism and the policy framework developed to implement it. A prologue, written by Frances Bula, outlines the political and urban history of Vancouver up until the 1980s. The text is also beautifully illustrated by the author with 200 colour photographs depicting not only the city’s vibrancy but also the principles of Vancouverism in action.

This book provides the tools to maintain and rebuild the interaction between architecture and public space. Despite the best intentions of designers and planners, interactive frontages have dwindled over the past century in Europe and North America. This book demonstrates why even our best intentions for interactive frontages are currently unable to turn a swelling tide of economic and technological evolution, land consolidation, introversion, stratification, and contagious decline. It uses these lessons to offer concrete locational, programming, design, and management strategies to maximize street-level interaction and trust between street-level architecture, its inhabitants, and the city. This book demonstrates that designers, developers, planners, and managers ultimately have to create the right preconditions for inhabitants and passersby to bring frontages to life. These preconditions connect architecture to its urban, social, economical, and technological context. Only the right frontage in the right context, with the right design, the right inhabitation, and the right attitude to the city will become part of the ecosystem of trust and interaction that supports public life. This book empowers the many participants in this ecosystem to build, inhabit, and enjoy truly urbane architecture.

This insightful book challenges Vancouverites and people everywhere in their view that progressivism is tolerance and challenges us to create a richer, more values-based culture - to move from values of looking good and feeling good, to the higher value of doing good.

This is the first comprehensive look at the role of North American suburbs in the last half century, departing from traditional and outdated notions of American suburbia.

Vancouver is heralded around the world as a model for sustainable development. In Planning on the Edge, nationally and internationally renowned planning scholars, activists, and Indigenous leaders assess whether this reputation is warranted. While recognizing the many successes of the “Vancouverism” model, the contributors acknowledge that the forces of globalization and speculative property development have increased social inequality and housing insecurity since the 1980s in the city and the region. By evaluating policies at the local, provincial, and federal levels and taking reconciliation with Indigenous peoples into account, Planning on the Edge highlights the kinds of policies and practices needed to reorient Vancouver’s development trajectory along a more environmentally sound and equitable path.

ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH METHODS ARCHITECTURE/GENERAL A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO RESEARCH FOR ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS—NOW UPDATED AND EXPANDED! From searching for the best glass to prevent glare to determining how clients might react to the color choice for restaurant walls, research is a crucial tool that architects must master in order to effectively address the technical, aesthetic, and behavioral issues that arise in their work. This book’s unique coverage of research methods is specifically targeted to help professional designers and researchers better conduct and understand research. Part I explores basic research issues and concepts, and includes chapters on relating theory to method and design to research. Part II gives a comprehensive treatment of specific strategies for investigating built forms. In all, the book covers seven types of research, including historical, qualitative, correlational, experimental, simulation, logical argumentation, and case studies and mixed methods. Features new to this edition include: Strategies for investigation, practical examples, and resources for additional information A look at current trends and innovations in research Coverage of design studio–based research that shows how strategies described in the book can be employed in real life A discussion of digital media and online research New and updated examples of research studies A new chapter on the relationship between design and research Architectural Research Methods is an essential reference for architecture students and researchers as well as architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and building product manufacturers.

In the years since the new mobilities paradigm burst onto the social scientific scene, scholars from various disciplines have analyzed the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of transport, contesting its long-dominant understandings as defined by engineering and economics. Still, the vast majority of mobility studies, and even key works that mention the “good life” and its dependence on the car, fail to consider mobilities in connection with moral theories of the common good. In Assembling Moral Mobilities Nicholas A. Scott presents novel ways of understanding how cycling and driving animate urban space, place, and society and investigates how cycling can learn from the ways in which driving has become invested with moral value. By jointly analyzing how driving and cycling reassembled the “good city” between 1901 and 2017, with a focus on various cities in Canada, in Detroit, and in Oulu, Finland, Scott confronts the popular notion that cycling and driving are merely antagonistic systems and challenges social-scientific research that elides morality and the common good. Instead of pitting bikes against cars, Assembling Moral Mobilities looks at five moral values based on canonical political philosophies of the common good, and argues that both cycling and driving figure into larger, more important “moral assemblages of mobility,” finally concluding that the deeper meta-lesson that proponents of cycling ought to take from driving is to focus on ecological responsibility, equality, and home at the expense of neoliberal capitalism. Scott offers a fresh perspective of mobilities and the city through a multifaceted investigation of cycling informed by historical lessons of automobility.