Customer Reviews

Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory

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Pragmatic exploitation of cities and their dwellers may be an ineradicable disease that drives the squalor and eventual decline of urban agglommerations, but those who take on diagnosis of the seemingly incurable become saviors if successful. There have been only a handful of modern-era thinkers with the knowledge, insight and creativity on what's wrong with the design of cities and what might be done to make it better, Viollet le Duc, Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch among them. It is an unexpected pleasure to encounter a new deep thinker standing on these giants' shoulders in Grahame Shane's magisterial "Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory." The volume is comprehensive on urbanism, historically and intellectually, and will amply reward the student, scholar and professional who reads it in parts or most beneficially, in whole -- more than once. Prepare to be highly educated by this book, not merely advised what to do to get or keep a job or get a project funded by public taxation. If read and comprehended by urban policy makers it will contribute to their escape from real estate development hell, or if not that, it will arm honorable officials against the weasels who want to claim cities as their own profitmaking playpens. Shane wonderfully reminds what it is like to learn from a deeply thoughtful scholar offering open wisdom compared to a city-exploiter pitching secret schemes. Still, one might imagine land developers and good buddy officials searching Shane's compendium for nuggets to use in their next snake oil presentation to suspicious citizen groups rightfully fed up with unceasing demands for bailouts.

If you want the book on urban design, one piece of work that covers it all and gives you depth, insight and outlook on this field like no other - then this is for you! A book that will become a classic in this field. Absoluetly with no competition!