Postmodern Urbanism: Revised Edition - Softcover

Ellin, Nan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156898135X ISBN 13: 9781568981352

Publisher: Chronicle Books, 2000

Synopsis

This text examines the issues that directly affect cities and neighbourhoods. Since the 1960s, many architects and urban planners have reacted against the drab universalism and inhuman scale of modern architecture and urbanism, seeking instead to recover a sense of community and place. It is apparent to these architects and planners that something needs to be done to improve the physical landscape and the sense of desolation that it arouses. Efforts to do so have been grouped under the rubric "postmodern urbanism". While this late-20th century quest for meaning has elicited nostalgia for cities of the past, it has not been acommpanied by a desire to relinquish technological innovations that raise the standard of living, or the pursuit of progress and modernity.

About this title

Review

Nan Ellin has written the best review of the postwar theories of urban design. Those who read Postmodern Urbanism will be enlightened; those who write afterward can only imitate." Robert A. Beauregard, New School for Social Research

From the Back Cover

While architecture has figured centrally in discussions of postmodernism, urban design has been largely overlooked. This engaging and important work by Nan Ellin fills that void by presenting a lucid account of what postmodernism means for the design of large-scale environments and for those who design and inhabit them. The book begins with the most thorough survey to date of recent Western urban design theory from the townscape movement to participatory architecture, regionalism, contextualism, neo-rationalism, neo-classicism, historical eclecticism, critical regionalism, and neo-traditionalism. Combining insights from anthropology, history, political economy, and literary criticism, Ellin proceeds to cast light upon the contemporary crises beleaguering the built environment and the architectural and planning professions. Both an intellectual history of urban design trends and an agenda for future interventions, Postmodern Urbanism offers an indispensable guide to deciphering the changing physical and social landscapes of the late twentieth century.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156898135X
• ISBN 13: 9781568981352
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 404