Book Review: Good City Form By Kevin Lynch

Economic factors are fundamental in determining urban structure. Cities can be seen as a form

This chapter helps to define some elements that may represent a city. For example, when

The readings by Alba, Massey and Sampson discussed below all focus on the relationship between demographic living patterns and urban social and economic development. Cities as our author's explain are more than a homogenous center but rather an accumulation of various parts. One of the vital elements of a city is its people. People interact with cities in several manners, as workers, citizens, tourists, developers, each influencing and being influenced by the urban environment. The arguments provided by the author's this week stress the importance of understanding how a city interacts with its citizens in order to understand the larger, more general social and economic trends present.

The author Jeff Speck is city planner and an urban designer. He is trying to save Americans lives by trying to make the city more walkable since automobiles have now become a great danger to the Americans. This book is more concerned with cars and buildings in order to achieve the goal of a walkable city. People are the lifeblood of the city and not cars therefore, in order to pull off the feat of ushering America to the urban century, there is need to prove to people that walkability is important and also that their actions and decisions will help will to improve this aspect.

Released in 2002, the movie “City of God” presents a number of key urban planning issues that a developing country might experience. The film seeks to illuminate several ideas related to the development of slums and the type of life associated with such areas, as well as urban crime and gangs. This film clearly illuminates the issues associated with government or public housing and the social networks that come up when people do not have a private space. The effects of limited living space are increased crime and the development of local governments that run parallel to the legal units set up in the country. A discussion of the urban planning issues arising from this film will follow, in light of the issues raised by Suketu Mehta in the article

Since the earliest days of our history, cities have served as the center for economic activity, social diversity, and religious inquiry. As renowned sociologist Joel Kotkin would say, cities are sacred, safe, and busy. When we look at the modern city, we see these concepts in action. Today, cities are defined by mass populations surrounding and creating major centers of commerce and economic activity. This density creates a diverse social climate in which fosters creativity and conversation, which can often times feed into the religious historical significance of cities. This density brings along with it a whole host of issues and various challenges that must be faced by the community in which they involve. One such issue is the idea of socio- economical inequality that comes as a result of dense populations sharing the same resources within a certain area. Within any community there are limited resources, and one such resource within a city is that of land and property availability. Gentrification, or the process in which developers purchase cheap properties to turn them over into more expensive and desirable assets, is a common practice in modern cities in the effort to reclaim some of this precious resource. In looking at the city of Chicago in the United States as well as the city of Lisbon in Portugal, I will

The book Concepts of Urban Design by David Gosling and Barry Maitland has stated that, “History provides a large number of traditional urban forms which have survived the passage of time and which work to a greater or lesser degree. (Gosling & Maitland, 1984).” This statement provides some evidence to show that even professionals in the planning world recognise and base some urban designs on ‘traditional urban forms’. Examples of this range from

Despite the negative factors of living in urban environment, there are a great number of positive sides that affect the life quality of people who live in urban cities. Perhaps, the

description of the construction of a good city. The good city is a relation to

“The best that can be said of the conception is that it did afford a chance to experiment with some physical and social planning theories which did not pan out. “ This quote reflects Jane Jacob’s philosophical ideas in an attempt to criticize the social housing’s design approach and its associated urban planning in modern era. “The physical and social theories” outlines the urban planning idea of social housing (Utopian idea) and according to Jane’s statement, such experiment of these theories were deem to be unsuccessful. It is inevitably certain to some extent that a provocative statement towards modern era social housing approaches would hold true due to the minimal success the plans brought to the city, such as solving the working class commendations temporarily. Nevertheless, it is a failure to deliver long-standing social improvements corresponded with the increasing suspicion of modernism, one cannot simply attribute ill fate to its “innovative physical features” (As Jane said, the Utopian and Utopia), but should rather considered a range of other elements in the larger aspect of society: factors such as difficulty of racial integration, problems of financing and management, lack of bridging between architecture and planning, as well as the increasing preference of suburban lifestyle from the rising mid class. These problems reflected evidently in some stereotypes of social housing communities built in the modern era such as Pruitt-Igoe, sunny side Gardens, Paul

The process of people moving into cities, which is called urbanisation, was happening around the world in past decades. It causes cities to have more labourers and resources than before. This makes a big contribution to the social development of cities. Thanks to these social developments, public services are becoming better in these areas. Citizens can enjoy a better life by access these public services such as better medical care, more education resources and well-built transport. It means an equitable society can be created. An equitable society means citizens can have more opportunities to access social resources and to live a better life. This essay will argue that

[1] Explained by this exemplifies that a city should have a foundation for it to grow off of. I do believe this will also be the doing of the citizens that help plan at meetings with communities, yet a good foundation is what will lead to a “good city”. Furthermore, with the influence of citizens, a good city will develop from nothing and will have a sense of cultural background from the past of citizens who live there currently.

The purpose of this paper is to review the key ideas of the Garden City Movement and to discuss how his ideas have been developed and revised in the latter urban planning theories, which are, the Garden Suburb, Satellite City, the New Towns Movement and the New Urbanism.

What is the one thing you can do to make a design of a city a place rich in architectural conditions? To answer this shortly, it is not just one thing, but a combination of architectural elements that make a design successful. To make a city rich in urban conditions, various elements have to be shown throughout the city. In my opinion, a well organized city, is a city well structured with a successful design. To form such successful design elements such as urban pattern and hierarchy need to be taken into considerations, in that way every single aspect of architecture included in the design of a city brings will bring it closer to a spatially rich urban condition. Following, I have listed the main key elements, including Hierarchy of objects, Urban Pattern, and Public Space, and the reasons why they are necessary for an urban conditions to accomplish it’s purpose of enriching a designed city.

Cities are places which have huge amount of gathering of people, collection of economic activities and complex infrastructure for people which all together are supported by transport systems.