Urban Design : Assignment 1 Essay

Urban growth is described as the increase in the number of people who live in towns and cities and suburbanisation can be defined as the outward growth of urban development.

From 1890 to 1920, cities in the United States experienced a rapid growth that was unprecedented in years previous. This growth was caused by a number of factors and resulted in both positive and negative consequences. Such factors included, industrialization, technological advances, migration and immigration. Although American cities greatly improved by the expeditious urbanization, these factors also developed numerous challenges including pollution, sanitation problems, a need for environmental reform, political corruption, overcrowding, high crime rates and segregation.

basement, somewhere north of the furnace and east of the root-cellar, where Clayt and Ella’s

Urban sustainability is the idea that an urban area can be organised without excessive reliance on the surrounding countryside and be able to power itself with renewable sources of energy. The aim of this is to create the smallest possible environmental footprint and to produce the lowest quantity of pollution possible, to efficiently use land, compost used materials, recycle it or convert waste-to-energy, and to make the urban area overall contribution to climate change minimal. Therefore allowing the next generations and future generations to have the required resources without compromising them. However sustainably needs to focus also on other issues such as crime and economic factors.

How successful has the regeneration of urban areas been given the variety of ways it has been undertaken (40 marks)

There are three places inside of Wethersfield that was mentioned by Kit. The first was the great meadow. The great meadow is a place by the

called the scar, is near the warm water lagoon. On the scar, where the boys

The address is 322 Market Street, Philadelphia, P.A. If you would like to schedule a group tour, call (215) 965-2305. We recommend visiting in the spring, as that is when the weather is fairest. Enjoy your time at Franklin Court!

Cities are characterized by the patterns of streets and squares that define their arrangement, a concept that undergoes frequent changes since the establishment of cities 10,000 years ago. There are multitude factors that influence such changes with system of government, values, population size, values, artistic sensibility, building methods, design techniques, paving techniques, military considerations, and transport technology being the main determinants. Medieval architectural designs emphasized on rigid grid forms, that contemporary writers of the history of urban planning and design, assume the presence of grids even in plans where they exist in approximate forms. Absence of grids is often perceived as lack of planning. Nevertheless, it is critical to note that the complex patters of streets in medieval cities were neither random nor chaotic.

“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

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,

An emerging issue is that of urban sprawl. While some aspects of urban sprawl has been seen since ancient times, this phenomenon has started gaining the most momentum in the past century, aided by the advancement of technology, especially with the rise of mass produced automobiles, houses and highway systems. Many people unknowingly contribute to this environmental problem, as is the nature of it. Urban sprawl deals with the growth of the suburbs, the area between the urban and rural areas of a city. Most of America’s largest cities and states, in terms of population, are prime examples of urban sprawl. Opponents of urban sprawl usually cite the government as a major cause of sprawl. The government may be a major catalyst of

Space that is documented and utilized by humans, whether directly or indirectly, takes on a basic level of social utility and cultural construction. As Elias Canetti would suggest, the prospect of touch carries with it the risk of being taken and subsequently assimilated or digested (1). The predecessors to the first great urban parks in the United States, namely country estates, cemeteries, and town squares or plazas, all contribute some aesthetic and related ideological basis for a newly emerging discourse of urban parks. Parks were seen as the “poor-man’s countryside,” in reference to the country estates of the wealthy. Also, cemeteries were the first naturalistic open spaces consistently built within urban boundaries. The idea of the commons and town square is perhaps the most telling predecessor of the city park.

In this book Lynch defines that performance of the city can be measured by reference to its spatial form. But the quality of a place is depends upon combined effect of place and the society which occupies that place. Here Lynch sets up new dimensions for performance in his own criteria. Author also expresses his approach on size of the city, conservation and growth, planning practices and utopian models. The dimensions which are demonstrated in this book may not be fully perfect but of course they combine all social values as well as physical values. Lynch believed that these described dimensions must cover all features of all forms of the settlements and all these dimensions should be usable where values are different.

Finally, many tools were used to document our site visits that would used during the modeling of the buildings. As stated before, PlanGrid was very useful when viewing the construction sheets. PlanGrid was used on an iPad for easy access during the site visit. The iPad, as well as our phones, was used to take pictures of any notable changes or major features of the buildings. The pictures were used as references during the modeling portion of the project. A measuring tape was also used to take the dimensions of sections of the buildings that were not clearly labeled on the construction sheets. For example, the Architecture Annex’s terrance needed a measuring tape to measure its dimensions because the top-down view was absent from the