Throughout the centuries humans have seen cities rise and fall; each one had its own unique style and charm. Although no city is completely alike, they all have one thing in common: the elements that create them. Without these components, cities would not be successful and they would not foster memorable urban experiences. The main critical elements that are essential when designing a spatially rich urban condition are density, street, hierarchy, urban edge, streetwall and facades, and public/urban space. When a person thinks of New York City, one of the first things that comes to mind is how crowded it is, not only because of the sheer amount of people but because of the plethora of buildings as well. In other words, Manhattan is the perfect representation of density. Cities have large and rapidly growing populations due to the fact that people have been moving to big urban areas in search of opportunities for many years, and cities have an obligation to provide those opportunities for the public. Consequently, the more people there are, the bigger the demand is for residential, commercial, and school buildings. Cities must meet those demands by expanding, which is where density comes in. Without density, a city would look like and act as any other suburb. The density, or structures, of a city can be either planned or unplanned. Spiro Kostof, author of The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, states, “The first kind is the planned or designed or
The New York colony was the second colony founded after Virginia. To learn more about the New York colony: the history, culture, and leaders of the colony will help picture life in the New York colony. The New York colony was founded in 1626 by the Dutch and was named New Netherlands until the English led by the Duke of York came in 1626, renaming New Netherlands, New York. Colonists from the New Netherlands colony had peaceful relationships with the Native American tribes surrounding the colony. They relied on peaceful relationships in order to make money from the fur trade. The culture and weather in New York was successful.
Paul Goldberger, an American architectural critic once quoted, “Urbanism works when it creates the journey as desirable as the destination.”
New York City’s old slum neighbourhood, the Five Points, was notoriously known for its vice and crimes. The first organized crime group in New York City was the Forty Thieves which was led by Edward Coleman, started in 1825, in the back of a grocery store. The Dead Rabbits were an Irish gang in the Five Points area, and are most known for the riot they caused in 1857. The Eastman Gang were a Jewish group in the Five Points area, which began in the late nineteenth century, and were the rival of the Five Points Gang. The Five Points Gang was another group, started by Paul Kelly and included future famous mobsters. In Five Points, where most of New York City’s crime started, it also started some of history’s most notorious gangs, and mobsters.
New York City has unique benefits in that there are tremendous amounts of people who live within close proximity to each other. This has resulted in higher uses of mass transit systems (such as: subways and buses). On average, New York’s total environmental footprint is 7.1 metrics tons per person annually. This is much lower than national average of 24.5 metric tons. The city contributes 1% of the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere for the United States each year. (“Inventory Greenhouse of New York City,” 2007) (Jarvey, 2006)
My minor insight is New York City as the financial capital of the world. New York’s thriving economy is one of the main reasons that it is a global metropolis. Not only is NYC an economic capital, but it is also a cultural capital of both the United States, and the world. NYC is made up of millions of immigrants (about 36% of the total population) who have been able to assimilate into the American lifestyle, and act as a resource for the growth of our economy. NYC’s diversity has benefited our city by producing talented, hard-working citizens, which can provide an example for many other cities around the globe. New York’s cultural identity has helped shape our city, by allowing
Living in America is a fantasy for a lot of people, but living in New York City is something even better, and more magical than any fantasy.
New York City is made up of five boroughs, which include the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Within these boroughs, there are high and low-income neighborhoods that contain either high or low status organizational structures or facilities. Each division has their own characteristics and top attractions, such as the Empire State building, Central Park, or Times Square. As New York City may be known for great food and fun attractions, New York faces infrastructure problems within each borough. New York City’s infrastructure funding is limited in lower income neighborhoods, where money needed to upkeep the city goes toward prime tourist’s areas or residents living in high status neighborhoods, such as The Upper East Side of Manhattan, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and Lenox Hill, Manhattan. Moreover, abandoned buildings, poor sewage conditions, and rocky roads and streets are examples of low-income area infrastructure problems that may hinder neighborhood growth both structurally and economically. Harlem, East Brooklyn, and South Bronx are low-income parts of New York that lack new and refined facilities, roads, plumbing, and fundamental structures, which contribute to high crime and arrests.
Every time I hear this song it makes me long to leave all of my responsibilities and head off to the city of dreams. A trip to New York has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl. I have always wanted to visit the place of tall buildings, history, and where culture is intertwined with its people. I have wanted to live the fast pace life of a New Yorker, where I could stand outside and see, smell, and taste all of the experiences that this city has to offer. I have been building and building this ideal image in my mind for so long. If I ever get to New York, will I be disappointed by the city that never sleeps? The city that is a part of almost every movie I watch. Can New York live up to the expectations I have
High Density is viewed as a key strategy to manage urban growth and is becoming an increasing feature of city plans; our very own city is an example of this.
As someone walks over the grates in the sidewalk, they can feel the wind rush up from the subway cars flying through the tunnels. While they continue walking down the street and looking at all the different people that they pass, they can smell the hotdogs being cooked in the food truck. In the distance, they hear a siren weaving through the congested narrow streets of this busy city. New York City is a one of a kind type of place. It is the only place in the world where so many different cultures and backgrounds are all in one place. Along with the multitudes of different types of people and cultures, New York City truly is the city that never sleeps. The city that never sleeps, New York City, is full sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feels.
New Urbanism, a burgeoning genre of architecture and city planning, is a movement that has come about only in the past decade. This movement is a response to the proliferation of conventional suburban development (CSD), the most popular form of suburban expansion that has taken place since World War II. Wrote Robert Steuteville, "Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for nearly all human transportation"1. New Urbanism, therefore, represents the converse of this planning ideology. It stresses traditional planning, including multi-purpose zoning,
His first comprehensive city plan was La Ville Contemporaine (the Contemporary City) a project to house three million inhabitants designed in 1922. This was Le Corbusier’s first attempt to reconcile man, nature and machine (Fishman, 189). The city starts at the center with a transportation hub for busses, trains, cars and planes. Surrounding this hub there will be an organized cluster of 24 60-story skyscrapers. These glass and steel skyscrapers are cross-shaped. Each individual skyscraper is to be set within a large rectangular green space. The skyscrapers house the “brain” of the city. The city is beautifully geometric and symmetrical. Placing the skyscrapers in the city center reinforces the emphasis on capital as a means of creating a successful city. Because of the shape and mass of each skyscraper, they have more usable space than an entire neighborhood but also relieves density and congestion because of the organization (Frampton, 46).
The city I propose as a perfect city, would be as close to an ecocity as possible, although have some differences. For example, for electrical needs, I would suggest the city have a solar power plant, but on those desperate times, energy would be bought from other electrical plants from nearby towns or states.
As per the authors definition of what urban design should be he discusses three aspects of cities, control and process, activities of humans and also the physical form of the city. As a planner or urban designer one should pay attention to all these aspects which forms a better
First of all, to start building a city an urban pattern has to be established, this will make the city look much more organized and well thought. A pattern can be chosen from a whole list of working patterns for a city. Establishing a grid is a common way of equally distributing the city. However, we want to keep in mind, that important buildings, such as businesses, and government buildings must be accessible to the public, but separated from the rest of the city. We have great examples of grids such as New York City, in New York, United States, or Mississauga City, in Toronto ,Canada. Although, when building from scratch it is not possible to leave aside what has already been built, a city indeed has to adapt to what is already existing, as well as to the new global economy, social and political trends, and new issues that arise in the new era, this also changes the structure and tradition of building and forming urban patterns. Using the existing patterns, combined with new ones, both patterns can collide and make new forms in city blocks. Results vary from city to city, but the essence is the same in all of them; old and new patterns coming together to create unplanned shapes, a new form of Urbanism, based on new and old patterns, aiming to satisfy the needs of the modern world. A great example is New York