Digital Modelling for Urban Design Review

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(More customer reviews)President Obama's establishment of an Urban Affairs Office again spotlights the need for design of the urban environment which goes far beyond economic exploitation dominated by the real estate and construction industries which has produced ugly chaos in buildings and infrastructure. Mastering the complexities of cities and the forces which shape them is difficult but necessary for sound comprehensive design; otherwise piecemeal endeavors so beloved by dealmakers seeking favorable privileges produce projects of reduced public benefit. To counter aggressive, narrowly-interested manipulators of the urban fabric, design tools are needed to research, study, explore and propose benefits for city dwellers. Brian McGrath's "Digital Modelling for Urban Design" will be welcomed by urban designers faced with daily barrages of commercial demands to forgo overall public interest and concentrate on the avarice of property developers and their batteries of biased financial, legal and design professionals. With the tools he describes it will be possible to reinforce the original purpose for founding urban design: the design, production and preservation of livable, healthy, safe and beautiful cities for all their inhabitants not merely the few who think they rule as their own what belongs to all.

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While there is a rich array of urban theory, design, and representation books available, there is currently no book which brings together, in a single volume, urban design theory and new digital technologies in urban information mapping, modeling, and 3D simulation. Based on two decades of practicing and teaching architecture, author Brian McGrath's Digital Modelling for Urban Design explores the new theories and technologies of digital modelling, focusing on how to create moving and interactive 3D drawing, skills useful in the context of urban theory, and design and representation. Fully illustrated with original maps, 3D models, and drawings and photographs, this innovative work introduces digital modelling to students, architects, designers, and planners interested in the processes key to shaping the urban environment.

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Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory Review

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(More customer reviews)Pragmatic exploitation of cities and their dwellers may be an ineradicable disease that drives the squalor and eventual decline of urban agglommerations, but those who take on diagnosis of the seemingly incurable become saviors if successful. There have been only a handful of modern-era thinkers with the knowledge, insight and creativity on what's wrong with the design of cities and what might be done to make it better, Viollet le Duc, Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch among them. It is an unexpected pleasure to encounter a new deep thinker standing on these giants' shoulders in Grahame Shane's magisterial "Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory." The volume is comprehensive on urbanism, historically and intellectually, and will amply reward the student, scholar and professional who reads it in parts or most beneficially, in whole -- more than once. Prepare to be highly educated by this book, not merely advised what to do to get or keep a job or get a project funded by public taxation. If read and comprehended by urban policy makers it will contribute to their escape from real estate development hell, or if not that, it will arm honorable officials against the weasels who want to claim cities as their own profitmaking playpens. Shane wonderfully reminds what it is like to learn from a deeply thoughtful scholar offering open wisdom compared to a city-exploiter pitching secret schemes. Still, one might imagine land developers and good buddy officials searching Shane's compendium for nuggets to use in their next snake oil presentation to suspicious citizen groups rightfully fed up with unceasing demands for bailouts.

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