Description
This book is recommended reading for planners preparing to take the AICP exam.
Successful urban planning is a collaborative effort that involves many disciplines. In this book, Larz Anderson acquaints readers with some of the basic procedures employed by professionals in related fields. Practicing planners will find it helpful to know the essentials of water and sewer systems, traffic generation, and site planning, so they can work more compatibly with civil engineers, traffic engineers, and landscape architects. Understanding their vocabulary and design constraints will foster better communication and more effective planning practice.
Planning the Built Environment takes a systematic, technical approach to describing how urban infrastructures work. Accompanied by detailed diagrams, illustrations, tables, and reference lists, the book begins with landforms and progresses to essential utilities that manage drainage, wastewater, power, and water supply. A section on streets, highways, and transit systems is highly detailed and practical.
Once firmly grounded in these "macro" systems,
Planning the Built Environment examines the physical environments of cities and suburbs, including a discussion of critical elements such as street and subdivision planning, density, and siting of community facilities.
Each chapter includes essential definitions, illustrations and diagrams, and an annotated list of references. This timely book explains new physical planning methods and current thinking on cluster development, new urbanism, and innovative transit planning and development.
Planners, architects, engineers, and anyone who designs or manages the physical components of urban areas will find this book both an authoritative reference and an exhaustive, understandable technical manual of facts and best practices. Instructors in planning and allied fields will appreciate the practical exercises that conclude each chapter: valuable learning tools for students and professionals alike.
Table of Contents
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Reviews
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This textbook is based on the premise that if you are an urban planner or want to be one, it would be helpful for you to know something about the engineering design concepts and methodologies involved in water and sewer systems, storm water drainage, transportation, and site planning for residential areas. If you are an instructor in a course having that as its purpose you should consider this book as a primary text. Or, if you are a planner and want a reference book with simplified, clearly communicated explanations of engineering terms, principles, and methods, you might want to have this on your shelf.
Part I, ôLand,ö contains useful definitions of terms about landforms, maps, and map analysis. It also explains how to read maps, measure land areas, and make a slope analysis map. This part of the book would be useful for the early part of a site planning course or a land use planning methods course.
Part II, ôUtilities,ö explains basic engineering concepts and methods for designing water supply distribution systems, wastewater management systems, and storm water drainage systems. There are useful glossaries of terms, diagrams of utility systems, examples, and formulas for sizing and laying out these systems. This part of the book provides an accessible introductory-level understanding of basic principles and methods. There is little exploration, however, of environmental quality issues, or the effects of varying city form, or assessments of alternative designs. The instructor or reader will have to go elsewhere for more depth and for discussions of issues.
Part III, ôTransportation,ö takes the reader through an abridged presentation of transportation facility planning. The definitions provided are helpful in creating a broad understanding and communicating the fieldÆs jargon in a clear and concise way. Perhaps too little room is devoted to critiques or comments about challenges to current transportation planning practice, while a relatively high number of pages (17) are dedicated to calculations of highway alignment and geometry. Although one can think of instances where such knowledge is of use to planners, it seems that the book pays too much attention to the design of such facilities and too little attention to transportation policy issues. Particularly relevant is an apparent dismissal of the connection between transportation and land uses and the lack of recognition that land uses are what create increased demand for transportation services and facilities.
Part IV, ôResidential Areas,ö is the largest part of the book. It contains explanations of the different types of housing, from single-family dwellings to apartments, and from stick-built to manufactured housing. It also reviews density concepts and inter-relationships between density, housing type, and building height. A chapter on neighborhood planning reviews both the positive features and criticisms of neighborhood concepts and demonstrates calculations of density, population, area required, and possible housing mixes for prototype neighborhoods, including New Urbanist neighborhood designs. Chapters on residential subdivision design explain the design process for street and lot layout. The final chapter presents a generic 10-step process for the technical phase of planning a community facility. As in the prior parts of the book, the residential area planning section provides practical explanations, diagrams, tables, and several excellent exercises to facilitate experiential learning. Alas, as elsewhere, the depth is not great and there is little discussion of the larger issues involved in residential community design, such as infill, redevelopment, and sprawl.
In conclusion, Planning the Built Environment is well written and quite useful, as far as it goes. It provides tight descriptions of engineering and land use design concepts and procedures, and there are a number of fully developed exercises in appendices to help students understand and apply the methods discussed. In that way, it gives the reader an introductory sense of what is involved in city design and engineering methodology. The average chapter, however, is only 11 pages in length, and a good number of those pages are diagrams, tables, glossaries, and references. Thus, if you need depth, you cannot get it in this book. The instructor, student, or planning practitioner will eventually need to go deeper into both the methods themselves and the fundamental issues underlying their application to creating the future built environment.
Edward Kaiser
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