Landscape architecture and design Books

Post-Rational Planning examines planners' unease with emotion and politics, advocating for more scholarship and practice capable of unpacking uses of rhetoric and framing to support or counter key planning decisions impacting social justice.

This book was first published in 1939.      

The Encyclopedia of the City focuses on the key topics encountered by undergraduates and scholars in urban studies and allied fields. Contributors include major theoreticians and practitioners, and on other individuals, groups, and organizations which...

  This book was first published in 1977.

Planning and Conflict discusses the reasons for conflicts around urban developments and analyzes their shape in contemporary cities. It offers an interdisciplinary framework for scholars to engage with the issue of planning conflicts, focusing on both...

Resilient Downtowns provides a guide to communities in reviving and redeveloping their core districts into resilient, thriving neighborhoods. While the National Main Street program's four-point approach of organization, promotion, economic restructuring,...

Historical Ground is dedicated to understanding how contemporary landscape architecture invokes and displays historical events and narrative.

Japanese cities are amongst the most intriguing and confounding anywhere. Their structures, patterns of building and broader visual characteristics defy conventional urban design theories, and the book explores why this is so.  Like its cities,...

Youth Politics in Urban Asia examines how young people's political actions in Asia are the product of their urban realities, and at the same time, appreciates that young people are striving to remake these urban spaces in a myriad of tangible and...

Various kinds of informal and extra-legal settlements-commonly called shantytowns, favelas, or barrios-are the prevailing type of urban land use in much of the developing world. United Nations estimates suggest that there are close to 900 million people...

While industrial and chemical innovations have contributed extensively to human advancement, the darker part of their legacy has been the hundreds of thousands of polluted sites left behind. Governments at all levels have rallied to support the...

The Power of Culture in City Planning focuses on human diversity, strengths, needs, and ways of living together in geographic communities. The book turns attention to the anthropological definition of culture, encouraging planners in both urban and...

This book examines urban planning and infrastructure development in Japanese cities after the second world war as a way to mitigate the risks of disasters while pursuing sustainable development. It looks at the benefits of social capital and how...

Well-designed infrastructure brings social value that far exceeds its initial construction expenditure, but competition for scarce government funds and a general public perception of infrastructure as mere efficiency, has often left design ill-considered...

This volume studies the urbanisation trends of medium-sized cities of India to develop a typology of urban resilience. It looks at historic second-tier cities like Nashik, Bhopal, Kolkata and Agra, which are laboratories of smart experiments and are...

This book addresses issues that waterfronts face in small Mediterranean port towns due to increases in the tourism industry. Integrating theory and pragmatic approaches, Waterfront Design in Small Port Towns proposes a design matrix which can go on to be...

The widespread adoption of smartphones has led to an explosion of mobile social media data, more than a billion messages per day that continuously track location, content, and time. Social Media in the Contemporary City focuses on the effects of social...

International Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative investigates the most significant global‐scale international trade expansion and capital investment programme since the Second World War.This book focusses on the multi-national perspectives of...

This book tackles the emerging smart urbanism to advance a new way of urban thinking and to explore a new design approach. It unravels several urban transformations in dualities: economic relationality and centrality, technological flattening and...

Being an effective city planner means being an effective leader. You need to be prepared to convince people that good planning matters. Often a well-written, thoughtful and inclusive plan doesn't result in meaningful action, because planners don't show...

Place-Keeping presents the latest research and practice on place-keeping - that is, the long-term management of public and private open spaces - from around Europe and the rest of the world. There has long been a focus in urban landscape planning...

Integrated Water Resource Planning provides practical, evidence-based guidance on water resource planning. In a time of heightened awareness of ecosystem needs, climate change, and increasing and conflicting demands on resources, water professionals and...

Infrastructure Planning and Finance is a non-technical guide to the engineering, planning, and financing of major infrastucture projects in the United States, providing both step-by-step guidance, and a broad overview of the technical, political, and...

Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning 5 is a selection of some of the best scholarship in urban and regional planning from around the world. The internationally recognized authors of these award-winning papers take up a range of salient issues from...

Tower and Slab looks at the contradictory history of the modernist mass housing block - home to millions of city dwellers around the world. Few urban forms have roused as much controversy. While in the United States decades-long criticism caused the...

"A model city, the hope of democracy" - John Nolen on his suggested plans for Madison, WisconsinThis book connects John Nolen's political and social visions with his design proposals by analyzing his extensive writings, personal correspondence and some...

Building on a growing movement within developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, as well as Europe and North America, this book documents cutting edge practice and builds theory around a rights based approach to women's safety in...

International contributors provide the first examination of the growing subject of regional knowledge-economy development. Illustrated by data and 'stylized' accounts, the international contributors chart the evolution of knowledge economies,...

Strategic Spatial Projects presents four years of case study research and theoretical discussions on strategic spatial projects in Europe and North America. It takes the position that planning is not well equipped to take on its current challenges...

Current expectations and standards of comfort are almost certainly unsustainable and new methods and ideas will be required if there is to be any prospect of a significantly lower carbon society. This collection reassesses relationships between people...

The New Urbanism is perhaps the most influential movement that has emerged in suburban design, planning, and development in recent decades. It proposes to reform conventional suburban development by "building community." Building the New...

The majority of the world's population is now urban, and for most this will mean a life lived in the suburbs. City Suburbs considers contemporary Anglo-American suburbia, drawing on research in outer London it looks at life on the edge of a world city...

In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, Linda Peake and Martina Rieker embark on an ambitious project to explore the extent to which a feminist re-imagining of the twenty-first century city can form the core of a new emerging analytic of...

This unique book focuses on regional creativity, analysing the different factors that can affect creativity and innovation process within regions in the knowledge economy. Approaching creativity from technological, organizational and regional viewpoints,...

Spatial Planning Systems of Britain and France brings together a wide selection of comparative essays to highlight the fundamental similarities and differences between the spatial planning in Great Britain and France: two countries that are near...

With urbanism becoming the key driver of socio-economic change in China, this book provides much needed up-to-date material on Chinese urban development. Demonstrating how it transcends the centrally-planned model of economic growth, and assessing the...

This international and illustrated work challenges current writings focussing on the problems of urban public space to present a more nuanced and dialectical conception of urban life.Detailed and extensive international urban case studies show how urban...

The issues surrounding the function and meaning of vernacular architecture in the twenty-first century are complex and extensive. Taking a distinctively rigorous theoretical approach, this book considers these issues from a number of perspectives,...

In this pioneering study of contemporary Chinese urban form, Duanfang Lu provides an analysis of how Chinese society constructed itself through the making and remaking of its built environment. She shows that as China's quest for modernity created a...

This book analyzes devolution as it affects the English Regions, working from the perspective of uneven development, and drawing on the rich tradition of regional geography. Currently, London is the power centre ruling over the other English regions. The...

Providing insights into this neglected Southeast Asian city, this interesting book interprets Vientiane's landscape - physical as well as imagined - as a reflection of key aspects of Lao geo-political history, the nature of Lao urbanism, and its...

Introducing Urban Design: Interventions and Responses is a new departure in the town planning series under the editorship of Clara Greed. The dynamic new subject and profession of urban design straddles the fields of town planning, architecture,...

Urban nature conservation is a field that has grown rapidly in importance over the past 20 years and will continue to do so in the coming years as landscape ecology and greenspace planning become established disciplines. A widespread concern and...

This book analyses the planning and policy world of major infrastructure as it is moving now in Europe and the UK. Have some countries managed to generate genuine consensus on how the large changes are progressed?  What can we learn from the...

Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of...

Using the case of Stockholm as the pivot of discussions, this book investigates the core issues of sustainable urban environmental development and planning. The book shows how intersecting fields such as urban planning and architecture, traffic planning,...

Showing how the upswell of paranoia and growing demand for security in the post-9/11 world has paradoxically created widespread insecurity, these varied essays examine how this anxiety-laden mindset erodes spaces both architectural and personal,...

This anthology of essays by a group of distinguished scholars investigates post-1945 city planning in Britain; not from a technical viewpoint, but as a polemical, visual and educational phenomenon, shifting the focus of scholarly interest towards the...