The View From the Road

Arts & Photography

Lynch, Kevin

Appleyard, Donald

Myer, John R.

Architecture

Mit Pr

When city planners and designers are given the ideal assignment—to build a new city in the wilderness, unencumbered by an existing urban matrix—and, at the same time, the site is located in the midst of a resource-rich region that attracts a rapid influx of people who proceed to build for themselves a burgeoning boomtown of indigenous settlements, planned without planners, conflicts are almost inevitable.  This book, based on the experience of Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela, demonstrates that the deeper conflicts between planners and people are not only the result of clashes of value or intent but are as much reflections of basic differences in perception. The planner sees his model of the projected city as a totality, from above; the inhabitant sees the present reality, from street level. The planner's map is a multicolored physical reality; the inhabitant constructs and constantly revises his mental map as experience interacts with memory.  The MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies has been involved with the planning of Ciudad Guayana from the time it was a gleam in the planners' eyes (The MIT Press has published several reports by participants in the project), and Donald Appleyard spent a number of summers at the site. The Joint Center has also sponsored pathfinding studies of urban perception and environmental cognition, notably Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City and Appleyard's The View from the Road (written with Lynch and John R. Myer). The book at hand is the product of the fruitful union of these two interests, a convergence of a subject and a methodology that illuminates both.  The author writes that "Ciudad Guayana was many cities in one. Different people knew it in different ways. Their perceptions of its parts, their predictions of how it might grow varied from group to group and from person to person. Citizens viewed the city in different ways depending on their backgrounds, familiarity with the city, patterns of use, educational level, and methods of transportation..."  The book pays particular attention "to certain aspects of environmental meaning by exploring how well the city's functional and social pattern, economic base, and natural environment are communicated to and accurately interpreted by its inhabitants," and describes "the inhabitants' perceptions of environmental change, remembered past, perceived present, expected future, and knowledge of the city's future plans..."  Policies, strategies, and techniques for planning cities which grow out of the pluralist character of their populations are proposed.

Planning a Pluralist City: Conflicting Realities in Ciudad Guayana

In recent years, the conservation of neighborhoods in American cities has risen to a high priority on the national agenda. The policy of demolishing whole neighborhoods in the inner city, whether to replace them with luxury apartments or massive public housing projects, has been largely abandoned, and the return of the middle class, seeking housing bargains in the neighborhoods they fled years ago, has hastened the process. Europe has much to teach the United States about urban conservation: it was a pressing public concern there when in this country conservation was mainly a matter of protecting wildlife and wilderness areas. The twenty-two essays in this volume—while discussing the conservation experiences of major European cities that are of considerable interest in their own right—present a preview of some of the struggles and solutions that are emerging on this side of the Atlantic as the conservation movement grows and extends into more and more urban districts. "Urban pioneering" and "gentrification" are becoming increasingly common in this country as the middle class seeks—in the face of energy shortages and slower growth, especially in housing—to reclaim the core cities that so many had once abandoned for suburbia. The first part of the book is concerned with the conflicts and struggles that have occurred over urban redevelopment in such cities as Venice, Brussels and Bath. The essays in the second part of the book describe a number of conservation efforts and strategies in cities such as Bologna, Stockholm and London which have attempted integration of social and physical conservation. The emphasis throughout is on conservation in specific neighborhoods—some historic districts, others humble working-class residential areas, a few both at once—rather than on conservation at the metropolitan scale. The separate essays range over such diverse topics as the impact of large-scale development projects on the existing city, the conservation of city centers and historic neighborhoods, the protection of monuments, the eviction of low-income migrants, examples of gentrification, amenity and conservation legislation, participatory action groups, social conservation strategies, and the education of children in urban conservation. The editor, in his extensive introduction, brings all these themes together setting them in the postwar history of European planning, and discussing issues such as the effects of tourism on old cities, the current crisis for modern architecture and planning, conflicting views and styles of conservation, the processes of pioneering and gentrification, and the relevance of this experience to the United States. The illustrated case studies center on the cities of London, Bolton, Bath, Elsinore, Stockholm, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Brussels, Grenoble, Bologna, Rome, Venice, Split, Athens, and Istanbul.

The Conservation of European Cities

Livable Streets

This is a second edition of the seminal work by Donald Appleyard, whose original publication has been developed and updated by his son, Bruce. The first book set out to challenge the assumption that cars should take precidence on the road, and to encourage planners and communities to improve urban streets, making them safer, more pleasant and joyful places to be. Including the orginal text alongside extra material with fresh insights, Livable Streets still has valuable lessons we need to learn.

Politics & Social Sciences

Appleyard, Bruce

Social Sciences

Routledge

Discusses traffic control, street management, and protected neighborhoods, and looks at selected streets in U.S. and British cities

Business & Money

Univ. of California Press

Sociology

University of California Press

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Books by Appleyard, Donald