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Introduction to Urban Design and Development

3-0-9 units. HASS-H · Undergraduate

Examines the evolving structure of cities and the way that cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas can be designed and developed. Surveys the ideas of a wide range of people who have addressed urban problems. Stresses the connection between values and design. Demonstrates how physical, social, political and economic forces interact to shape and reshape cities over time. Introduces links between urban design and urban science.

Spring 2006

Topics

  • Introduction
  • Ways of Seeing the City
  • The Forces That Made Boston
  • Walking Tour of Boston
  • The Design of American Cities
  • The Industrial City and Its Critics
  • Development Controls Part I: The Institutionalization of Planning and Zoning
  • Development Controls Part II: Beyond Zoning: Urban Design Guidelines, Design Review and Development Incentives
  • Three Urban Utopias: - Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City - Le Corbusier’s Radiant City - Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City
  • New Towns in the United States and Abroad
  • The Suburbs Part I: The Origins and Growth of Suburbs
  • The Suburbs Part II: Rethinking American Suburbs
  • Shaping Private Development/Growth Management
  • Urban Renewal and Its Critics
  • The Tumult of American Public Housing
  • Cultural Districts, Heritage Areas and Tourism: If You Name It, Will They Come?
  • Discussion of Exercise 2
  • Downtown Development and the Privatization of Public Space
  • Landscape, the Environment and the City
  • Natural Processes
  • Transportation and Its Impacts
  • The Rise of Community Activism
  • The Virtual City
  • The Secure City - The Fortification of Space
  • Discussion of Final Paper

Readings

  • Clay, Grady. “Epitome Districts.” In Close-Up: How to Read the American City . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 38-65. ISBN: 0226109453.
    Listed reading
  • Jacobs, Allan. “Clues,” and “Seeing Change.” In Looking At Cities . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 30-83 and 99-107. ISBN: 0674538919.
    Listed reading
  • Stilgoe, John. “Beginnings,” and “Endings.” In Outside Lies Magic . New York, NY: Walker and Co., 1998, pp. 1-19 and 179-187. ISBN: 0802713408.
    Listed reading
  • Krieger, Alex. “Past Futures: Boston - Visionary Plans and Practical Visions.” Places 5, no. 3 (1989): 56-71.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960, pp. 1-25. ISBN: 9780262620017. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Seasholes, Nancy S. “Back Bay and South End.” In Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 152-209. ISBN: 9780262194945. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Whitehill, Walter Muir, and Lawrence W. Kennedy. Boston: A Topographical History . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959, Revised in 1968 and in 2000. ISBN: 0674002687.
    Listed reading
  • Campbell, Robert. “After the Big Dig, the Big Question: Where’s the Vision?” Boston Globe , May 26, 2002.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Beyond the Big Dig National Panel Recommendations.” Boston Globe , May 30, 2002.
    Listed reading
  • Morris, Anthony E. J. “Urban USA.” In History of Urban Form . London, UK: George Godwin, 1979, pp. 254-289. ISBN: 0711455120.
    Listed reading
  • Chudacoff, Howard P., and Judith E. Smith. “Urban America in the Colonial Age, 1600-1776.” In The Evolution of American Urban Society . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981, pp. 1-35. ISBN: 0132936054.
    Listed reading
  • Hall, Peter. “The City of Dreadful Night.” In Cities of Tomorrow . Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988, pp. 14-46. ISBN: 0631134441.
    Listed reading
  • Crawford, Margaret. “Textile Landscapes: 1790-1850,” and “The Company Town in an Era of Industrial Expansion.” In Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns . New York, NY: Verso, 1995, pp. 11-45. ISBN: 0860916952.
    Listed reading
  • In-class video: Excerpt from The Workplace , on Lowell, Massachusetts and Pullman, Illinois.
    Listed reading
  • Lewis, Roger K. “The Powers and Pitfalls of Zoning,” and “From Zoning to Master Planning… and Back.” In Shaping the City . Washington, DC: AIA Press, 1987, pp. 274-281. ISBN: 0913962880.
    Listed reading
  • Barnett, Jonathan. “Zoning, Mapping, and Urban Renewal As Urban Design Techniques,” and “Designing Cities Without Designing Buildings.” In An Introduction to Urban Design . New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1982, pp. 57- 97. ISBN: 0064301141.
    Listed reading
  • Babcock, Richard. “The Stage - Historical and Current,” and “The Purpose of Zoning.” In The Zoning Game . Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966, pp. 3-18 and 115-125. ISBN: 0299040941.
    Listed reading
  • Whyte, William H. “The Rise and Fall of Incentive Zoning.” In City: Rediscovering the Center . New York, NY: Doubleday, 1988, pp. 229-55. ISBN: 0385054580.
    Listed reading
  • Scheer, Brenda Case. “Introduction: The Debate on Design Review.” In Design Review: Challenging Urban Aesthetic Control . Edited by Brenda Case Scheer and Wolfgang F. E. Preiser. New York, NY: Chapman & Hall, 1994, pp. 1-10. ISBN: 0412991616.
    Listed reading
  • Jaffe, Martin. “Performance Zoning - A Reassessment.” Land Use Law and Zoning Digest 45, no. 3 (1993): 3-9.
    Listed reading
  • In-class video: Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces , selections. VHS. New York, NY: Municipal Society of Art, 1984.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Howard, Ebenezer. “Introduction,” and “The Town-Country Magnet.” In Garden Cities of To-Morrow . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965, pp. 41-57. ISBN: 9780262580021. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Wright, Frank Lloyd. “Broadacre City.” In Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture . New York, NY: Wiley and Sons, 1987, pp. 351-361. ISBN: 0471845094.
    Listed reading
  • Corbusier, Le. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning . New York, NY: Dover, 1987, pp. 232-247 and 275-288. ISBN: 0486253325.
    Listed reading
  • Stein, Clarence. “Radburn, New Jersey.” In Toward New Towns for America . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966. ISBN: 9780262690096.
    Listed reading
  • Birch, Eugenie L. “Five Generations of the Garden City.” In From Garden City to Green City . Edited by Kermit C. Parsons and David Schuyler. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 171-200. ISBN: 0801869447.
    Listed reading
  • Jackson, Kenneth. “Introduction,” “The Transportation Revolution and the Erosion of the Walking City,” and “Affordable Homes for the Common Man.” In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 3-11, 20-44, and 116-137. ISBN: 0195049837.
    Listed reading
  • Fishman, Robert. “The Post-War American Suburb: A New Form, A New City.” In Two Centuries of American Planning . Edited by Daniel Schaffer. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, pp. 265-278. ISBN: 0801837197.
    Listed reading
  • Stilgoe, John. “Intellectual & Practical Beginnings.” In Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 21-64. ISBN: 0300042574.
    Listed reading
  • Southworth, Michael, and Peter M. Owens. “The Evolving Metropolis: Studies of Community, Neighborhood and Street Form at the Urban Edge.” Journal of the American Planning Association 59, no. 3 (1993): 271-287.
    Listed reading
  • Gans, Herbert. “Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Re-evaluation of Definitions.” In People, Plans and Policies: Essays on Poverty, Racism, and Other National Urban Problems . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0231074034.
    Listed reading
  • Krier, Leon. “Town and Country,” “Critique of Zoning,” “Critique of Industrialisation,” “The Idea of Reconstruction,” and “Urban Components.” In Leon Krier: Houses, Palaces, Cities . New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1985, pp. 30-42. ISBN: 0312479905.
    Listed reading
  • Hayden, Dolores. “Nostalgia and Futurism.” In Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth , 1820-2000 . New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2004, pp. 201-229. ISBN: 0375727213.
    Listed reading
  • “Bye Bye Suburban Dream.” Newsweek , May 15, 1994.
    Listed reading
  • Flint, Anthony. “Instant Suburb: the Growth of the Suburban Belt along the Interstate 495 Corridor Is Fast, Intense, and Largely Unplanned. Is It Good for Community? Hopkinton Takes Stock.” Boston Globe Magazine , June 16, 2002.
    Listed reading
  • Calthorpe, Peter, and William Fulton. “Designing the Region.” Chapter 6 in The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl . Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001, Introduction, Conclusion, pp. 107-171 and 271-277. ISBN: 1559637846.
    Listed reading
  • Gillham, Oliver. “Outlining the Debate.” In The Limitless City: A Primer on the Urban Sprawl Debate . Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002, pp. 69-81. ISBN: 1559638338.
    Listed reading
  • Gans, Herbert. “The West End: An Urban Village.” In The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans . New York, NY: Free Press, 1962, pp. 3-16. ISBN: 0029112400.
    Listed reading
  • Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities . New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1961, pp. 3-25. ISBN: 067974195X.
    Listed reading
  • Mumford, Lewis. “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.” In The Urban Prospect . New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 182-207. ISBN: 0151931909.
    Listed reading
  • Gans, Herbert. “Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism” (Review of Jane Jacobs’ book). In People, Plans and Policies: Essays on Poverty, Racism, and Other National Urban Problems . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0231074034.
    Listed reading
  • Franck, Karen A., and Michael Mostoller. “From Courts to Open Space to Streets: Changes in the Site Design of U.S. Public Housing.” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 12, no. 3 (1995): 186-220.
    Listed reading
  • Newman, Oscar. “Housing Design and the Control of Behavior.” In Community of Interest . New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, pp. 48-77. ISBN: 0385111231.
    Listed reading
  • Vale, Lawrence J. “From the Puritans to the Projects: The Ideological Origins of American Public Housing.” Harvard Design Magazine 8 (1999): 52-57.
    Listed reading
  • McKee, Bradford. “Public Housing’s Last Hope.” Architecture 86, no. 8 (1997): 94-105.
    Listed reading
  • Frenchman, Dennis. “Narrative Places and the New Practice of Urban Design.” In Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions . Edited by Lawrence J. Vale and Sam Bass Warner, Jr. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 2001. ISBN: 0882851691.
    Listed reading
  • Skim “Executive Summary of the Master Plan for the Worcester Arts District, Community Partners Consultants, Inc., 2002.” ( PDF - 8.7 MB ) ↗
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Frieden, Bernard, and Lynne Sagalyn. Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, pp. 1-13 and 215-238. ISBN: 0262560593. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Rybczynski, Witold. “The New Downtowns.” The Atlantic Monthly 271, no. 5 (1993): 98-106.
    Listed reading
  • Robertson, Kent A. “Downtown Redevelopment Strategies in the United States: An End-of-the-Century Assessment.” Journal of the American Planning Association 61, no. 4 (1995): 429-437.
    Listed reading
  • Geddes, Norman Bel. Excerpt from “Magic Motorways.” In Building the Nation: Americans Write about Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape . Edited by Steven Conn and Max Page. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, pp. 228-231. ISBN: 0812218523.
    Listed reading
  • Downs, Anthony. “Remedies That Increase Residential Densities,” “Changing the Jobs-Housing Balance,” and “Concentrating Jobs in Large Clusters.” In Still Stuck in Traffic . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004, pp. 79-126. ISBN: 0815719299.
    Listed reading
  • In Class Video: Klein, Jim and Martha Olson. Taken for a Ride , selections. VHS. Harriman, NY: New Day Films, 1996.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Mitchell, William J. “March of the Meganets,” and “Homes and Neighborhoods.” In E-topia: “Urban Life, Jim, But Not As We Know It” . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. ISBN: 0262632055. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Low, Setha. “Unlocking the Gated Community,” and “Fear of Others.” In Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America . New York, NY: Routledge, 2004, pp. 7-26 and 133-152. ISBN: 0415950414.
    Listed reading
  • Kostof, Spiro. “Keeping Apart.” In The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History . London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2005. pp. 102-110. ISBN: 0500281726.
    Listed reading
  • Davis, Mike. “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space.” Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space . Edited by Michael Sorkin. New York, NY: Noonday, 1992. ISBN: 0374523142.
    Listed reading
  • Zinganel, Michael. “Crime Does Pay! How Security Technology, Architecture and Town Planning Are Powered by Crime.” Archis (March 2002): 44-50.
    Listed reading
  • Please skim: National Capital Planning Commission, The National Capital Urban Design and Security Plan. October 2002. ( PDF ) ↗
    Listed reading

Prerequisites & course information

Same subject as 11.001[J] Prereq: None U (Fall, Spring) 3-0-9 units. HASS-H

Sources