Ethics and Urban Design Culture, Form, and Environment [Hardcover]

The city, according to urban design scholar Gideon Golany, is the largest and most complicated project ever produced byhumankind. In Ethics and Urban Design, he challenges designprofessionals to reexamine their basic assumptions about the urbanenvironment and offers design strategies based on enduring humanvalues.

In search of answers to the paradoxical problems of the moderncity, Golany takes the reader through the sweep of humansettlements from the dawn of civilization to the present. Hisauthoritative examination of the genesis of the city is illuminatedby instructive examples of early urban centers. Mesopotamia, theIndus River Valley, the Egyptian cities of the Nile, and thecapital cities of ancient China--all are examined in the light ofwhat made them work as major centers of human activity.

What Golany finds in the success stories of the past are cohesivesociocultural values that shaped the design of homes,neighborhoods, and cities. These ethical values helped to maintainan equilibrium within the society that permeated its natural,social, and human-made environments. In the present era,conversely, he finds a major disconnection between human values andthe ethics of technology, which has resulted in confusion,imbalance, and dehumanization.

To help designers gain a perspective on possible solutions, Golanyexplains leading comprehensive design strategies, including thevalley theory, the urban border zone concept, and the regionalconcept of Patrick Geddes. In the case study of contemporaryHolland, he details what a small, densely populated country hasbeen able to achieve through design planning rooted inenvironmental ethics.

Future Frontiers for Urban Design, the culminating section ofthis groundbreaking book, opens with Golany's vision of the futurecity. He examines the issues of thermal performance and climate asthey relate to urban design and offers the concept of geospace --l3&