It is a widely held belief that cities must change, or they will wither and die. One of the key problems of urbanization is how to cope with these changes while retaining the structures constructed and maintained by previous generations.Conservation and the City is a study of conservation and change throughout the built environment - city centres, suburbs and even tiny villages - and how the activites of conservation interact with the planning system. Using detaile...

Set within a wider British and international context of post-war reconstruction, The Everyday Experiences of Reconstruction and Regeneration focuses on such debates and experiences in Birmingham and Coventry as they recovered from Second World War bombings and post-war industrial collapse.Including numerous images, Adams and Larkham explore the initial development of the post-Second World War reconstruction projects, which so substantially changed the face of the cities an...

Triggered in part by contemporary experiences in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere, there has been a rise in interest in the blitz and the subsequent reconstruction of cities, especially as many of the buildings and areas rebuilt after the Second World War are now facing demolition and reconstruction in their turn. Drawing together leading scholars and new researchers from across the fields of planning, history, architecture and geography, this volume presents an historical and cu...

People have designed cities long before there were urban designers. In Shapers of Urban Form, Peter Larkham and Michael Conzen have commissioned new scholarship on the forces, people, and institutions that have shaped cities from the Middle Ages to the present day.Larkham and Conzen collect new essays in "urban morphology," the people-centered predecessor to contemporary theories of top-down urban design. Shapers of Urban Form focuses on the social processes that ...

Placemaking: People, Properties, Planning, delivers a cross-disciplinary critique of “placemaking”, an approach to the design and creation of new urban places, and the reshaping of old ones, that has become so pervasive that it forms the ‘strapline’ for the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute. Developing principally from planning and urban design, placemaking has swiftly become a new orthodoxy, a dominant paradigm. It seems to be all-encompassing, particularly at a time when towns ...

Notions of authenticity lie at the heart of many questions about heritage and identity in the built environment. These questions are most pertinent when buildings have been destroyed in disaster or war, and the built fabric is being reconstructed to reinstate traditional or historic appearances in place of what was lost.Authentic Reconstruction examines this idea of reconstruction, using it as a prompt to examine a range of deeper issues on heritage and the built environme...

The book explores how unused and under-used urban spaces – from grass verges, roundabouts, green spaces – have been made more visually interesting and more productive, by informal (and usually illegal) groups known as “guerrilla gardeners”. The book focuses on groups in the English Midlands but the work is set in a broad international context and reveals how and why they undertake this illegal activity. Guerrilla gardening is usually viewed uncritically and promoted as a worthwhile activit...

At the heart of the European debate lies the tension between the idea of European unity and individual state identities and nationalisms. This volume provides an insight into this dichotomy by exploring the role of heritage in the new Europe.The main theme of this book is that a number of possible heritages can be shaped from the European past depending on the purposes for which they are intended. Through different methods of management intervention, heritage can fulfil a variety o...

The history of post Second World War reconstruction has recently become an important field of research around the world; Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction is a provocative work that questions the orthodoxies of twentieth century design history.This book provides a key critical statement on mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War to the mid-sixties. The various figures a...

The editors and contributors to this volume demonstrate how suburbs and the meaning of suburbanism change both with time and geographical location. Here the disciplines of history, geography and sociology, together with subdisciplines as diverse as gender studies, art history and urban morphology, are brought together to reveal the nature of suburbia from the nineteenth century to the present day.