TownhouseCenter.org

This page contains resources related to small, adaptable buildings in the area of Urban Planning grouped by topics: Small, Adaptable, Mixed Use, Economic Opportunity, and Disaster Recovery.  Suggestions welcome!

Urban Planning > General

• Organization: CNU
• Site: Historic Aerials
• Site: Urban Lovers
• Site: Visualizing Density.  Also print: Julie Campoli & Alex MacLean, Visualizing Density (Lincoln 2007), 160 pages.
• Site: Walk Score
• Blog: New World Economics
• Blog: Old Urbanist
• Video: “Growing ‘In’ in the 21st Century: Incremental Growth Patterns” at CNU 20
• E-Publication: Todd Litman, “Affordable-Accessible Housing In A Dynamic City: Why and How To Increase Affordable Housing Development In Accessible Locations“
• E-Publication: Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral & The Bazaar“
• E-Publication: “About Town“, Sonoran Institute with Urban3, full text and brochure
• E-Publication: Community Architect blog post series about Baltimore and other rowhouses, including 2011-07-20, 07-26, 08-26, and  09-06.
• Print: Julie Campoli, Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form (Lincoln Institute 2012) 176 pages.
• Print: Roberta Gratz, The Living City: How America’s Cities Are Being Revitalized by Thinking Small in a Big Way (Wiley 1995) 448 pages.
• Print: Roberta Gratz, Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown (Wiley 2000) 376 pages.
• Print: Roberta Gratz, “Introduction: Authentic Urbanism and the Jane Jacobs Legacy”, Urban Villages and the Making of Communities, ed. Peter Neal (Spon 2003).
• Print: Hans Ibelings, Ed Melet, Bernard Hulsman & Allard Jolles, Eastern Docklands Amsterdam: Urbanism and Architecture (NAi 2003) 224 pages.
• Print: Allan Jacobs & Donald Appleyard, “Toward an Urban Design Manifesto”, APA Journal, pp 112-120.
• Print: Christopher Leinberger, “The Next Slum?“, The Atlantic Magazine, 2008-03.
• Print: Jason McLennan, “Density & Sustainability: A Radical Perspective”, Trim Tab Spring 2009
• Print: Arthur Nelson, “Leadership in a New Era“, JAPA, Vol 72, No 4, Autumn 2006, pp 393-409.
• Print: Witold Rybczynski, “Bringing the High Line Back to Earth“, New York Times 2011-05-14 (“The High Line may be a landscaping project, but a good part of its success is due to its architectural setting, which, like the 12th Arrondissement, is crowded with interesting old and new buildings”)
• Print: Natalie Weinberger, “The Shophouse as a Tool for Equitable Urban Development: The Case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia“, Masters thesis, University if Pennsylvania School of Design, Spring 2010.
• Print: Geoffrey West, e.g. “A Physicist Solves the City“, NYTimes, 2012-12-17.

Urban Planning > Small

• Company: Urban3 property tax studies
• Organization: National Trust for Historic Preservation Green Lab.  Also print: Julia Levitt, “Preservation Green Lab’s Liz Dunn on the Economics of Urban Grain“, The Atlantic Magazin3 2011-12-01 (“We could measure, for example, economic and social activity on blocks that have a larger number and variety of skinnier buildings”)
• Video: Small Is Beautiful: Local Economic Networks of the Pre-Auto Era at CNU 20
• E-Publication: Hazel Borys, “Retail on My Mind“, Place Shakers 2012-02-20 (“Mixed use developed on a lot-by-lot basis can expand, contract, and repurpose”)
• E-Publication: Charles Gardner, “Blocks of New York“, Old Urbanist 2011-07-21
• E-Publication: Katherine King, “Jane Jacobs and ‘The Need for Aged Buildings’: Neighbourhood Historical Development Pace and Community Social Relations“, Urban Studies, 2013-03-04.
• E-Publication: Richard Reep, “Localism As An Anti-Depressant“, New Geography 2012-07-03 (“People are turning local needs into opportunities at a scale that is small enough that outside help is not needed.”)
• E-Publication: Dan Parolek, “Missing middle housing: Responding to demand for urban living“, Better! Cities & Towns 2012-04-03
• Print: Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (Routledge 1986), 264 pages
• Print: Edward McMahon, “Density Without High-Rises?“, Citiwire Magazine 2012-05-11.
• Print: E. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper 1989)
• Print: Hideo Shirasishi & Yoshihisa Wakita, “Considerations on Space Organization of Shophouse and Block Formation in Phnom Penh, Cambodia”, Journal of Architecture and Planning, No. 616 (2007-06) pp. 7-14.
• Print: Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

Urban Planning > Adaptable

• Print: Anne Moudon, Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco (MIT Press 1989), 308 pages.
• Print: David Wilson, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time (Little, Brown 2011), 448 pages.
• Print: Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford University Press 2011), 360 pages.

Urban Planning > Mixed Use

• Site: Testing, Testing (“People actually felt happier and more activation, excitement, and engagement standing in front of an older, more crowded, messier streetscape”)
• Audio: Richard Sennett, “The Edge: A Space for Culture“, University of London, 2012-11-09
• E-Publication: Richard Sennett, “Why Complexity Improves the Quality of City Life” (“The Holy Grail for urban designers like myself, the quest to build truly mixed-use environments in order that the inhabitants develop a more complex, adult understanding of one another”)
• Print: Jurgen Krusche, “Berlin ist hässlich – und das ist gut so!”, Arch+ #201/202, pp 62-65

Urban Planning > Economic Opportunity

• Video: Richard Florida on Towers as Vertical Suburbs: CNU 20 Friday Night Plenary.  Also audio: Richard Florida on NPR (with transcript).  Also print: Richard Florida, “The Limits of Density“, The Atlantic Cities Magazine 2012-05-16.  Richard Florida, “For Creative Cities, the Sky Has Its Limit“, Wall Street Journal 2012-07-27.
• Print: Peter Gordon & Sanford Ikeda, “Does Density Matter?“

Urban Planning > Local Government Revenue

• Site: Strong Towns
• E-Publication: “About Town“, Sonoran Institute, 2012.
• E-Publication: “Building Better Budgets: A National Examination of the Fiscal Benefits of Smart Growth Development“, Smart Growth America, 2013

Urban Planning > Disaster Recovery

• E-Publication: Eric Klineberg, “Adaptation: How can cities be ‘climate-proofed’?“, New Yorker, 2013-01-07.
• Print: Daniel Aldrich, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery (University of Chicago 2012), 248 pages.