Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City (The MIT Press)

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Metropolitan areas speak, which little book assists us understand their vocabulary. That is a user’s instruction to the town, a primer of urban literacy, at the pedestrian level. Taking into consideration the urban landscape not really from the abstract perspective of an urban planner but from the viewpoint of an attentive observer, Urban Code offers 100 “lessons”―maxims, observations, and bite-size truths, accompanied by brief essays―that teach us how exactly to read the town. The reader (just like the observant town stroller) can move from “People walk in the sunshine” (lesson 1) to “Street vendors sit according to the route of the sunlight” (lesson 2); consider feasible connections between the reality that “Locals and travelers use the roads at different instances” (lesson 41) and “Visitors stand still when they’re searching at something” (lesson 68);”

A lesson might seem self-evident (“Grocery shops are essential local destinations”―of training course they are! and weigh the obvious contradiction of lesson 73, “Nightlife hotspots boost pedestrian visitors” and lesson 74, “People fear so much the dark. With Urban Code, we find out what things to notice if you want to understand the town.) but regarded as in the context of various other lessons, it becomes component of an all natural logic. We figure out how to identify patterns in the interactions between people and the urban environment. Each lesson is usually accompanied by an icon-like image; furthermore to these 100 drawings, thirty photographs of road scenes illustrate the written text. The photos are stills from movies shot in the Manhattan community of SoHo;

See also

• A Theory of Good City Form
• The Architecture of Parking
• Siteless: 1001 Building Forms