Urban Design Guidelines of American Cities - Design Policies and Guidelines of Five Cities on the West Coast

Author: John Pente
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: This book is a study on urban design work and urban design policies in five cities along the U.S. West Coast. These cities are: Seattle (including Bellevue), Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and San Diego. The urban design experiences of these cities are very interesting and have close connections with design practices in the UK and other countries. Although these cities are not typical representatives of all urban design practices in the U.S., they provide a wealth of information on recently developed design policies and current urban design practices, which will encourage people to consider establishing effective urban design control systems. The book includes numerous excerpts from important documents that form the foundation of the design control systems in these five cities. Professionals and scholars who wish to learn more about U.S. case studies, as well as those seeking to improve urban design policies and the standards and quality of design control, will find this book both interesting and inspiring, and it will encourage them to make their own contributions. The opening chapter provides the domestic background and comparative framework for this research, while also focusing on international perspectives, the U.S. planning system, and the development of comparative and evaluation standards. The following five chapters discuss each of the five cities in turn. Before explaining how planning and design policies have gradually evolved over the past 25 years, each chapter briefly reviews the distinctive characteristics of the city. It emphasizes the key features of contemporary design control systems and provides a brief evaluation. The case studies focus on how design policies and guidelines were formulated, structured, and presented in the various documents that constitute the policy framework, how control procedures operate, and how design work and control systems respond to criticism. The urban design experiences studied in the book are closely related to U.S. design review practices, and the final chapter summarizes these findings, which will also be of interest to those working on design review and design policy formulation in various regions.