Oil Extraction, Urban Environment, And City Planning The Los Angeles Experience

1971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melville C. Branch
Author(s):  
Harold Platt

As places of dense habitation, cities have always required coordination and planning. City planning has involved the design and construction of large-scale infrastructure projects to provide basic necessities such as a water supply and drainage. By the 1850s, immigration and industrialization were fueling the rise of big cities, creating immense, collective problems of epidemics, slums, pollution, gridlock, and crime. From the 1850s to the 1900s, both local governments and utility companies responded to this explosive physical and demographic growth by constructing a “networked city” of modern technologies such as gaslight, telephones, and electricity. Building the urban environment also became a wellspring of innovation in science, medicine, and administration. In 1909–1910, a revolutionary idea—comprehensive city planning—opened a new era of professionalization and institutionalization in the planning departments of city halls and universities. Over the next thirty-five years, however, wars and depression limited their influence. From 1945 to 1965, in contrast, represents the golden age of formal planning. During this unprecedented period of peace and prosperity, academically trained experts played central roles in the modernization of the inner cities and the sprawl of the suburbs. But the planners’ clean-sweep approach to urban renewal and the massive destruction caused by highway construction provoked a revolt of the grassroots. Beginning in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965, mass uprisings escalated over the next three years into a national crisis of social disorder, racial and ethnic inequality, and environmental injustice. The postwar consensus of theory and practice was shattered, replaced by a fragmented profession ranging from defenders of top-down systems of computer-generated simulations to proponents of advocacy planning from the bottom up. Since the late 1980s, the ascendency of public-private partnerships in building the urban environment has favored the planners promoting systems approaches, who promise a future of high-tech “smart cities” under their complete control.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jack J. Jiang

<p>Cycling is a memory of the past for most of us, the lack of support from the authorities on the cycling infrastructure made it difficult to attract people to cycle in the city. Urban sprawl, traffic congestion, car dependency, environmental pollution and public health concerns have pressured cities around the world to consider reintegrating cycling into the urban environment.  Design as a research method was utilised to investigate the effectiveness of design methodology and workflow for cycling infrastructure from an architecture and design perspective. Using Wellington City as a design case study, this research aimed to improve the legibility, usability and the image of cycling as a mode of transport in the city. To achieve this, a customisable graphical design framework and branding strategies were developed to structure and organise the design components within cycling infrastructure. The findings from the iterative design processes were visualised through the appropriate architectural and presentation conventions.  This research provided an unique architectural perspectives on the issues of cycling infrastructure; the results would support the transportation advisers and urban planners to further the development and integration of cycling, as a viable mode of transport, within the city.</p>


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Robert Lemon

This introduction places taco trucks within a historical context and presents geographical concepts that are used throughout the book. It briefly reviews Mexican street food origins, from the Aztec capital's cuisine to modern-day tacos in Los Angeles. It takes a close look at the advent of the taco truck in California and how taco trucks mirror Mexican immigration patterns across the nation. The chapter then discusses the ways taco trucks fit into contemporary geographic discourses related to landscape contestation, sociospatial practices, urban policy, city planning, food studies, and cultural landscape studies. It presents the friction of how taco trucks--as an expression of the informal economy--are emerging within rationally controlled cities, and that a community’s definition of “quality of life” most often determines a taco truck's place within a city.


Belleten ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 84 (299) ◽  
pp. 75-104
Author(s):  
Alev Erarslan

The Master Ottoman Architect Sinan, known as Mimar Sinan, produced numerous works of different character, among these, mosques, madrasahs, masjids (prayer rooms), khans (inns), caravanserais, covered bazaars, hammams (bath-houses), darüşşifa (hospitals), imarets (hospices), darülkurra (Koranic schools), sibyan mektebi (primary schools), tekke (lodges), waterways, aqueducts, fountains and palaces. Sinan is an architect that imprinted his mark upon his era by not repeating himself in any of the structures he created. Appointed the head of the Sultan's Society of Architects in 1538, Sinan created a great number of architectural works. Throughout the years of his long career in Ottoman architecture, in which time he produced an expansive typology of works, Architect Sinan also made a major contribution to urban planning. As Chief Architect, Sinan was responsible for many urban activities having to do with wastewater, fire prevention and the repair of many public buildings in Istanbul. Although documentation pertaining to Sinan's concept of the urban environment is scant, an analysis of all his structures suggests the existence of a delicate notion of city planning. Looking into the placement of the structures, their functional distribution within the city, the special roles they play in the general urban landscape, as well as their relationships to each other, it is not difficult to witness the rational conceptualization of a city. This article will attempt to examine the works of Architect Sinan in terms of his perspective on kulliye architecture, analyzing the contributions he made to these structures within the urban fabric, and to review his major kulliyes as intrinsic parts of the entirety of the city.


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