America's New Downtowns
Subtitle: Revitalization or Reinvention? (Creating the North American Landscape)
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: June 3, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780801871634
Subjects: City & town planning - architectural aspects; Regional geography; Urban & municipal planning; Urban communities; Social Science; Landscape; Politics / Current Events; Urban renewal; Sociology; USA; Earth Sciences - Geography; Public Policy - City Planning & Urban Dev.; Sociology - Urban; Architecture / Landscape; Case studies; Central business districts; United States
First sentence: Downtowns are not like they used to be, but then, they probably never were.
Description: "Ford begins with a brief history of U.S. urban development. He then explains his criteria for evaluating downtowns before proceeding with an on-the-street examination of the featured sixteen cities. Each is rated based on use of physical site, particularly for housing (unlike suburbs, Ford notes, most downtowns are located in challenging physical locales, such as harbors, rivers, hills, or peninsulas), street morphology, civic space, functional aspects (office space, retail stores, and convention centers), and the support districts in the fringe areas surrounding the downtown core. Ford concludes with a suggested model of downtown structure based upon the case studies and with a look at the possible effects of increasing globalization on the downtowns of the early twenty-first century. This book will appeal to those interested in urban studies, landscape studies, American studies, architecture, historic preservation and planning, and urban geography." "Larry R. Ford is a professor of geography at San Diego State University who has taught urban geography for thirty years."--Jacket.