News   Sep 27, 2024
 470     0 
News   Sep 27, 2024
 305     0 
News   Sep 27, 2024
 238     0 

Top 10 Urban Planning Books for 2011

He probably wouldn't have due to time and watching copious amounts of soccer, but not because he wasn't interest...but at least Miller wrote a book.
 
Very few of those books are relevant to Toronto. "LA in maps" and "Interstate 69" looks like it's for history buffs; William Mitchell is a technophile from MIT who basically thinks we're all going to be zipping around in egg-shaped cars that are guided by a central system - so I can't really take him seriously; the Sharon Zukin book was panned for just being another Marxist take on gentrification in New York.

The public parks book and the one by Jan Gehl are probably applicable, though.
 
Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

Product Description

Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution.

Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.
 

Back
Top