Order without Design

Order without Design PDF Author: Alain Bertaud
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038765
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners' dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities' productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.

Order without Design

Order without Design PDF Author: Alain Bertaud
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038765
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book

Book Description
An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners' dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities' productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.

Order Without Design

Order Without Design PDF Author: Martha S. Feldman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804717267
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In this lively and, ultimately, disturbing study of policy analysts who are employed in bureaucracies, the author finds a startling paradox. The analysts know that the papers they so painstakingly prepare will not be used; as one analyst remarked, "Either it won't get done in time, or it won't be good enough, or the person who wanted it done will have left and no one will know what to do with it, or the issue will no longer exist." Yet the analysts continue to work at producing these papers. The means of producing information is at the heart of the paradox. The process systematically produces information that is difficult to use directly in decision-making. Yet analysts can do little to alter the constraints of the process. They continue to produce papers because it is their job, they value doing it, and it is their major means of influencing policy. In so doing they make a unique, though indirect, contribution to policy making. Drawing on eighteen months of observation and participation in the work of the policy office of the U.S. Department of Energy, the author fully investigates the conditions that create the paradox and the positive as well as the negative implications of the process of information production in organizations.

Strategy Without Design

Strategy Without Design PDF Author: Robert C. H. Chia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895502
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
A unique analysis of strategy in organizations that shows how successful strategies may result without planning or design.

Lectures on Urban Economics

Lectures on Urban Economics PDF Author: Jan K. Brueckner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300311
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
A rigorous but nontechnical treatment of major topics in urban economics. Lectures on Urban Economics offers a rigorous but nontechnical treatment of major topics in urban economics. To make the book accessible to a broad range of readers, the analysis is diagrammatic rather than mathematical. Although nontechnical, the book relies on rigorous economic reasoning. In contrast to the cursory theoretical development often found in other textbooks, Lectures on Urban Economics offers thorough and exhaustive treatments of models relevant to each topic, with the goal of revealing the logic of economic reasoning while also teaching urban economics. Topics covered include reasons for the existence of cities, urban spatial structure, urban sprawl and land-use controls, freeway congestion, housing demand and tenure choice, housing policies, local public goods and services, pollution, crime, and quality of life. Footnotes throughout the book point to relevant exercises, which appear at the back of the book. These 22 extended exercises (containing 125 individual parts) develop numerical examples based on the models analyzed in the chapters. Lectures on Urban Economics is suitable for undergraduate use, as background reading for graduate students, or as a professional reference for economists and scholars interested in the urban economics perspective.

Land Use without Zoning

Land Use without Zoning PDF Author: Bernard H. Siegan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1538148641
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The conversation about zoning has meandered its way through issues ranging from housing affordability to economic growth to segregation, expanding in the process from a public policy backwater to one of the most discussed policy issues of the day. In his pioneering 1972 study, Land Use Without Zoning, Bernard Siegan first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective: Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban growth and separating incompatible uses, but also drives housing costs up and competition down. In no uncertain terms, Siegan concludes, “Zoning has been a failure and should be eliminated!” Drawing on the unique example of Houston—America’s fourth largest city, and its lone dissenter on zoning—Siegan demonstrates how land use will naturally regulate itself in a nonzoned environment. For the most part, Siegan says, markets in Houston manage growth and separate incompatible uses not from the top down, like most zoning regimes, but from the bottom up. This approach yields a result that sets Houston apart from zoned cities: its greater availability of multifamily housing. Indeed, it would seem that the main contribution of zoning is to limit housing production while adding an element of permit chaos to the process. Land Use Without Zoning reports in detail the effects of current exclusionary zoning practices and outlines the benefits that would accrue to cities that forgo municipally imposed zoning laws. Yet the book’s program isn’t merely destructive: beyond a critique of zoning, Siegan sets out a bold new vision for how land-use regulation might work in the United States. Released nearly a half century after the book’s initial publication, this new edition recontextualizes Siegan’s work for our current housing affordability challenges. It includes a new preface by law professor David Schleicher, which explains the book’s role as a foundational text in the law and economics of urban land use and describes how it has informed more recent scholarship. Additionally, it includes a new afterword by urban planner Nolan Gray, which includes new data on Houston’s evolution and land use relative to its peer cities.

Shaping Places

Shaping Places PDF Author: David Adams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415497965
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Shaping Places explains how towns and cities can turn real estate development to their advantage to create the kind of places where people want to live, work, relax and invest. It contends that the production of quality places which enhance economic prosperity, social cohesion and environmental sustainability require a transformation of market outcomes. The core of the book explores why this is essential, and how it can be delivered, by linking a clear vision for the future with the necessary means to achieve it. Crucially, the book argues that public authorities should seek to shape, regulate and stimulate real estate development so that developers, landowners and funders see real benefit in creating better places. Key to this is seeing planners as market actors, whose potential to shape the built environment depends on their capacity to understand and transform the embedded attitudes and practices of other market actors. This requires planners to be skilled in understanding the political economy of real estate development and successful in changing its outcomes through smart intervention. Drawing on a strong theoretical framework, the book reveals how the future of places will come to be shaped through constant interaction between State and market power. Filled with international examples, essential case studies, color diagrams and photographs, this is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking planning, property, real estate or urban design courses as well as for social science students more widely who wish to know how the shaping of place really occurs.

Cities for People

Cities for People PDF Author: Jan Gehl
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597269840
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people. Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale. For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. A “Toolbox,” presenting key principles, overviews of methods, and keyword lists, concludes the book. The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.

Arbitrary Lines

Arbitrary Lines PDF Author: M. Nolan Gray
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642832545
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up

A Pattern Language

A Pattern Language PDF Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190050357
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Building For Everyone

Building For Everyone PDF Author: Annie Jean-Baptiste
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119646243
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Diversity and Inclusion to build better products from the front lines at Google Establishing diverse and inclusive organizations is an economic imperative for every industry. Any business that isn’t reaching a diverse market is missing out on enormous revenue potential and the opportunity to build products that suit their users' core needs. The economic “why” has been firmly established, but what about the “how?” How can business leaders adapt to our ever-more-diverse world by capturing market share AND building more inclusive products for people of color, women and other underrepresented groups? The Product Inclusion Team at Google has developed strategies to do just that and Building For Everyone is the practical guide to following in their footsteps. This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Readers will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability. Discover the questions you should be asking about diversity and inclusion in your products for marketers, user researchers, product managers and more. Understand the research the Product Inclusion team drove to back up their practices Learn the “ABCs of Product Inclusion” to build inclusion into your organization’s culture Leverage the product inclusion suite of tools to get your organization building more inclusively and identifying new opportunities. Read case studies to see how product inclusion works across industries and learn what doesn't work. Building For Everyone will show you how to infuse your business processes with inclusive design. You’ll learn best practices for inclusion in product design, marketing, management, leadership and beyond, straight from the innovative Google Product Inclusion team.