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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at.Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exac...

With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond.This is a chronicle, as inform...

Traversing the nation, Municipal Dreams offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable of our housing estates, and in doing so offers an engrossing social history of housing in Britain. John Broughton asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices. His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the co...

Are Britain’s cities attractive places in which to live, work and play? Asking that question, this is a critical review of how the design dimension of the Urban Renaissance strategy was developed and applied, based on expert academic assessments of progress in Britain’s thirteen largest cities. The case studies are preceded by a dissection of New Labour’s renaissance agenda, and concluded by a synthesis of achievements and failings. Exploring the implications of this strategy for the futur...

Back in 1997, New Labour came to power amid much talk of regenerating the inner cities left to rot under successive Conservative governments. Over the next decade, British cities became the laboratories of the new enterprise economy: glowing monuments to finance, property speculation, and the service industry-until the crash.In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the wreckage-the buildings that epitomized an age of greed and aspirat...