Sunday, April 29, 2007

Principles of Urban Structure, Nikos A. Salingaros (2005)

PRINCIPLES OF URBAN STRUCTURE

NIKOS A. SALINGAROS

Techne Press, Amsterdam, Holland, 2005.
ISBN: 90-8594-001-X

Salingaros Biographical note
Web Page of "PRINCIPLES OF URBAN STRUCTURE"


About the Book

From Nikos Salingaros Web Site
A monograph consisting of several of my urban papers. Introduces the unifying notion of the network city to understand urban phenomena as components of a complex system. This book is meant to satisfy the needs of professional urbanists, students, and teachers who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure.



From The Back Cover
This book explains how cities actually work. Written in plain English, it will serve as a guide and inspiration for planners to re-humanize our cities using the latest technologies and recent understanding from science and mathematics.

The dogma of mainstream urbanism cannot cope with the changes in technology, culture and science of the last decades. the heritage we are left with is an overly asphalted and sterile concrete environment. Therefore this book addresses the needs of professional urbanists, students and teachers, who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure. Most of the needs are related to the urgent search for new instruments of urban planning and design, to which this book contributes conceptually by showing how to connect the fractal city on multiple levels.

There is an increasing awareness that a city needs to be understood as a complex interacting system. Different types of urban systems overlap to build up urban complexity in a living city. This raises the need for using concepts such as coherence, emergence, information, self-organization and adaptivity. This book relates these concepts to the city, shows how to operationalize them, and hopefully marks the beginnings of an urban science.
Architecture-Urbanism is dedicated to a) those who are interested in creating livable and sustainable environments and buildings that meet socio-cultural and socio-behavioral needs of people, environments that are responsive to historical, traditional and physical constraints, b) to those who are interested in finding panacea for the ills of our globalized world, and c) to those who are interested in regaining what cultures and societies have lost by the acts of architects. ____________________________________________________________________________