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.

Land Use without Zoning

Land Use without Zoning PDF Author: Bernard H. Siegan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
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.

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.

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.

Restorative Cities

Restorative Cities PDF Author: Jenny Roe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350112895
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Overcrowding, noise and air pollution, long commutes and lack of daylight can take a huge toll on the mental well-being of city-dwellers. With mental healthcare services under increasing pressure, could a better approach to urban design and planning provide a solution? The restrictions faced by city residents around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought home just how much urban design can affect our mental health – and created an imperative to seize this opportunity. Restorative Cities explores a new way of designing cities, one which places mental health and wellness at the forefront. Establishing a blueprint for urban design for mental health, it examines a range of strategies – from sensory architecture to place-making for creativity and community – and brings a genuinely evidence-based approach that will appeal to designers and planners, health practitioners and researchers alike - and provide compelling insights for anyone who cares about how our surroundings affect us. Written by a psychiatrist and public health specialist, and an environmental psychologist with extensive experience of architectural practice, this much-needed work will prompt debate and inspire built environment students and professionals to think more about the positive potential of their designs for mental well-being.

The Effect

The Effect PDF Author: Nick Huntington-Klein
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000509141
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
Extensive code examples in R, Stata, and Python Chapters on overlooked topics in econometrics classes: heterogeneous treatment effects, simulation and power analysis, new cutting-edge methods, and uncomfortable ignored assumptions An easy-to-read conversational tone Up-to-date coverage of methods with fast-moving literatures like difference-in-differences

The Media City

The Media City PDF Author: Scott McQuire
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473903076
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"If only more new media commentators had this level of historical-critical reference, engaging, good stories, and a degree of wonder at what media and windows bring to the city, to life." - John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths, University of London "Just when you thought the last word had been said about cities and media, along comes Scott McQuire to breathe new life into the debate. When revisiting existing pathways, his always ingenious eyes produce startling and original insights. When striking out into new territory, he opens up before us inspiring new vistas. I love this book." - James Donald, University of New South Wales "A book that crams into a single chapter more insights and illustrations than seems feasible, yet which ties all threads together through a consistent, theoretically rich analysis of the interplay of media and city... Writing with effusiveness uncharacteristic of back-cover blurbs on academic tomes, James Donald says 'I love this book'. But I will end by echoing his praise, and make a promise to readers: you will love The Media City, too." - European Journal of Communication "Refreshingly clear, getting to grips with some of the key concepts of urban sociology in a way that moves beyond the wistful evocation and splatter of undigested terms that characterises so much academic writing on culture and cities." - Media, Culture & Society Significant changes are occurring in the spaces and rhythms of contemporary cities and in the social functioning of media. This forceful book argues that the redefinition of urban space by mobile, instantaneous and pervasive media is producing a distinctive mode of social experience. Media are no longer separate from the city. Instead the proliferation of spatialized media platforms has produced a media-architecture complex - the media city. Offering critical and historical analysis at the deepest levels, The Media City links the formation of the modern city to the development of modern image technologies and outlines a new genealogy for assessing contemporary developments such as digital networks and digital architecture, web cams and public screens, surveillance society and reality television. Wide-ranging and thoughtfully illustrated, it intersects disciplines and connects phenomena which are too often left isolated from each other to propose a new way of understanding public and private space and social life in contemporary cities. It will find a broad readership in media and communications, cultural studies, social theory, urban sociology, architecture and art history. Winner of the 2009 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award, awarded by the Urban Communication Association.

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