An explanation of how and why cities took the shape they did. It focuses on a number of themes - organic patterns, the grid, the city as diagram, the grand manner and the skyline - and interprets the hidden order of urban patterns. Photographs depict a global mosaic of citybuilding.

Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice.

In this volume, 253 archetypal patterns consisting of problem statements, discussions, illustrations, and solutions provide lay persons with a framework for engaging in architectural design.

Los Angeles has become a magnet for the American apocalyptic imagination, with many disasters - both real and those created by Hollywood movies - in recent years. This book examines the history of disaster - both real and imagined - in Los Angeles.

Includes writings on urban economics, bosses and machines, urban development, the creative class, metro politics, Occidentalism, Asian mega cities, and urban futurism. This book provides the mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies. It is illustrated with over forty photographs and is intended for those interested in the city.

This book is a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design and of the role of the architect-planner in an urban context.

An exploration of Los Angeles, told with passion, wit and a sharp eye for the absurd, the unjust and the dangerous. The author tells a lurid tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made LA one of the most cosmopolitan and class-divided cities in the United States.

This volume is a critical history of planning in theory and practice in the 20th century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it. It reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the 20th century.

A reference for anyone interested in the field of landscape urbanism.

With a third of the global urban population already living in Dickensian slums, at least half under the age of twenty, this book explores the threat of disease, of forced settlement on hazardous terrains, and of state violence on huge populations. It also shows how poverty grew massively in the 1990s.

This work compares hundreds of streets around the world to determine the design and other elements that make some of them great . It contains plans, cross-sections, maps of individual streets and a set of one-square-mile maps of the street plans of 50 cities around the world.

Presents a universal history of the elements of cities: streets, public spaces, urban divisions, and the borders of city and countryside. A companion volume to The City Shaped which dealt with cities as complete entities, this book follows the evolution of their components.

This book takes place at the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries, in the pre- and post-September 11th world. It is a singular product of its time, packed full of words and images portraying the architectural projects and metaphysical mechanics that have defined Rem Koolhas's OMA-AMO firm over the past seven years.