Search results for ""author alexander garvin""

What makes a great city? Not a good city or a functional city but a great city. A city that people admire, learn from, and replicate. City planner and architect Alexander Garvin set out to answer this question by observing cities, largely in North America and Europe, with special attention to Paris, London, New York, and Vienna. For Garvin, greatness is not just about the most beautiful, convenient, or well-managed city; it isn't even about any "city." It is about what people who shape cities can do to make a City great. A great city is not an Exquisite, completed artefact. It is a dynamic, constantly changing place that residents and their leaders can reshape, to satisfy their demands. While this book does discuss the history, demographic composition, politics, economy, topography, history playout, architecture, and planning of great cities, it is not about these aspects alone. Most importantly, it is about the interplay between people and public realm and how they have interacted throughout history to create great Cities. To open the book, Garvin explains that a great public realm attracts and retains the people who make a city great.He describes exactly what the term public realm means, its most important characteristics, as well as providing examples of when and how these characteristics work, or don't. An entire chapter is devoted to a discussion of how particular components of the public realm (squares in London, parks in Minneapolis, and streets in Madrid) shape people's daily lives. He concludes with a look at how twenty-first century initiatives in Paris, Houston, Atlanta-Brooklyn, and Toronto are making an already fine public realm even better, initiatives that demonstrate what other cities can do to improve. What Makes o Great City will help readers understand that any city can be changed for the better-and inspire entrepreneurs, public officials, and city residents to do it themselves.

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Everything that anybody (whether they are citizen activists, or public officials, or professional landscape architects, architects, and planners) needs to know about the critical role public parks play in creating livable communities. Millions of dollars are being spent on restoring parks and creating new ones. Planner Alexander Garvin explains the rationales for their existence, the forms they take, their value, ways to pay for and govern them, and the ingredients that make successful parks, providing the first single definitive source of wisdom about them.

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Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles. In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts--of both successes and failures--of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.

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The Planning Game: Lessons from Great Cities provides a focused, thorough, and sophisticated overview of how planning works, generously illustrated with 200 colorful photographs, diagrams, and maps created expressly for the book. It presents the public realm approach to planning—an approach that emphasizes the importance of public investments in what we own: streets, squares, parks, infrastructure, and public buildings. They are the fundamental elements in any community and are the way to determine our future. The book covers planning at every level, explaining the activities that go into successfully transforming a community as exemplified by four cities and their colorful motive forces: Paris (Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann), New York (Robert Moses), Chicago (Daniel Burnham), and Philadelphia (Edmund Bacon). The Planning Game is an invaluable resource for planners, students, community leaders, and everybody involved with making better places to live.

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In the mid-twentieth century, as Americans abandoned city centers in droves to pursue picket-fenced visions of suburbia, architect and urban planner Edmund Bacon turned his sights on shaping urban America. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged new approaches to neighborhood development and elevated Philadelphia's image to the level of great world cities. Urban development came with costs, however, and projects that displaced residents and replaced homes with highways did not go uncriticized, nor was every development that Bacon envisioned brought to fruition. Despite these challenges, Bacon oversaw the planning and implementation of dozens of redesigned urban spaces: the restored colonial neighborhood of Society Hill, the new office development of Penn Center, and the transit-oriented shopping center of Market East. Ed Bacon is the first biography of this charismatic but controversial figure. Gregory L. Heller traces the trajectory of Bacon's two-decade tenure as city planning director, which coincided with a transformational period in American planning history. Edmund Bacon is remembered as a larger-than-life personality, but in Heller's detailed account, his successes owed as much to his savvy negotiation of city politics and the pragmatic particulars of his vision. In the present day, as American cities continue to struggle with shrinkage and economic restructuring, Heller's insightful biography reveals an inspiring portrait of determination and a career-long effort to transform planning ideas into reality.

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