The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design: A History of Shifting Manifestoes, Paradigms, Generic Solutions, and Specific Designs

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design is a comprehensive history of urban design ideas and paradigms from the past 150 years, focusing on their origins, projects, functions, and lessons learned. It explores the evolution of the built environment through the perspectives of philosophers, novelists, architects, and social scientists, providing a reference for scholars and students in urban spaces.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 424 pages
Publication date: 01 August 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design is a comprehensive and richly illustrated historical account of the evolution of urban design concepts and paradigms over the past 150 years. Spanning a wide range of ideas and projects, both hypothetical and realized, this book explores the scale of these concepts, from the city to the urban block level. Its central focus lies in examining the origins of generic ideas, the projects that were designed in accordance with these principles, the functions they serve or afford, and the valuable lessons we can draw from them.

The morphology of a city, its physical landscape, emerges organically through the conscious and deliberate actions of private and governmental investors as they construct buildings and infrastructure to serve their own purposes. Philosophers, novelists, architects, and social scientists have generated a vast array of ideas about the nature of the built environment, often viewing them as superior to those that arise from a hands-off approach to urban development.

Rationalist theorists envision ideal futures based on assumptions about what is good, while empiricists draw inspiration from what they perceive to be working well in existing situations. Both groups have expressed their advocacy through manifestos and frequently in the form of generic solutions or illustrative designs. This book serves as a comprehensive historical record of these ideas and will become a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the history of urban spaces, encompassing a wide range of disciplines such as architecture, planning, urban history, urban geography, and urban morphology.

Weight: 830g
Dimension: 246 x 174 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367569051