Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People - Hardcover

"At last! Urbanism is in, and urban designers Brown, Dixon, and Gillham offer a focused lens through which to understand it. Combining urban design history and precepts with selected case studies, they generously interlace their text with deeply held convictions about the importance of urban form and place to twenty-first-century quality of life. This remarkable compilation offers fresh examples and new ways of thinking that can enhance the collaborative endeavors of urban designers, public officials, land-use policymakers, and their communities."
—From the Foreword by Marilyn Jordan Taylor, FAIA Dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design Partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

"The wisest, clearest introduction I know to the art and science of designing cities."
—Robert Campbell, Pulitzer Prize–winning Boston Globe architecture critic

Urban Design for an Urban Century is divided into two parts:

Part I, Paradigms, Principles, and Process, traces the roots of urban form from early cities to suburbanization and now recentralization. The final chapter offers a set of principles to help urban designers meet the challenges of today and tomorrow, including creating sustainable design strategies that accommodate changing demographics and values.

Part II, Putting Urban Design into Practice, shows how the principles set forth in Part I are applied, detailing case studies drawn from projects recognized for excellence by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Institute Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design program. These case studies demonstrate how urban designers shape human environments, stressing the essential role of community engagement in each facet of urban design. The authors use the case studies to demonstrate how urban designers are responding to changes in technology, urban economies, views toward sustainability, and similar dynamics.

Urban designers, planners, and architects will discover new approaches and a new set of principles for handling urban projects that will serve them now and for many years to come.

David Dixon, FAIA, a principal of Goody, Clancy & Associates, Inc. in Boston, was the 2006 chair of the AIA’s Regional and Urban Design Knowledge Community. An urban designer who writes and speaks frequently, his recent work extends from revitalizing urban neighborhoods to creating regional smart growth guidelines for places such as Asheville, North Carolina, Baltimore, Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami, New Haven, Connecticut, and Norfolk, Virginia. Dixon helped shape the AIA’s response following Hurricane Katrina and he subsequently led recovery planning for approximately one-quarter of New Orleans. In 2008, the city selected Dixon and his firm to create a master plan for New Orleans’s future.

The late Oliver Gillham, AIA, was an architect and city planner with more than thirty years of experience in dealing with the issues of urbanization. A former senior designer and director of urban design for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Boston, he also had worked for the Massachusetts Port Authority and had established the firm Gillham & Gander Associates. He was the coauthor of The Limitless City: A Primer on the Urban Sprawl Debate.