Urban Code

100 Lessons for Understanding the City

Anne Mikoleit, Moritz Pürckhauer

$65

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

MIT Press
26 August 2011

City & town planning - architectural aspects

Series: The MIT Press

A primer in urban literacy that teaches us in words and pictures what to notice if we want to understand the city.

Cities speak, and this little book helps us understand their language. Considering the urban landscape not from the abstract perspective of an urban planner but from the viewpoint of an attentive observer, Urban Code offers 100 ""lessons""-maxims, observations, and bite-size truths, followed by short essays-that teach us how to read the city. This is a user's guide to the city, a primer of urban literacy, at the pedestrian level. The reader (like the observant city stroller) can move from ""People walk in the sunshine"" (lesson 1) to ""Street vendors are positioned according to the path of the sun"" (lesson 2); consider possible connections between the fact that ""Locals and tourists use the streets at different times"" (lesson 41) and ""Tourists stand still when they're looking at something"" (lesson 68); and weigh the apparent contradiction of lesson 73, ""Nightlife hotspots increase pedestrian traffic"" and lesson 74, ""People are afraid of the dark.""

A lesson may seem self-evident (""Grocery stores are important local destinations""-of course they are!) but considered in the context of other lessons, it becomes part of a natural logic. With Urban Code, we learn what to notice if we want to understand the city. We learn to detect patterns in the relationships between people and the urban environment. Each lesson is accompanied by an icon-like image; in addition to these 100 drawings, thirty photographs of street scenes illustrate the text. The photographs are stills from films shot in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo; the lessons are inspired by the authors' observations of SoHo, but hold true for any cityscape.

By: Anne Mikoleit, Moritz Pürckhauer
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 200mm, Width: 121mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 249g
ISBN: 9780262016414
ISBN 10: 0262016419
Series: The MIT Press
Pages: 112
Publication Date: 26 August 2011
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Anne Mikoleit is a research scientist and PhD candidate, teaching architecture and urban design in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Moritz P rckhauer is a former research scientist at ETH Zurich and is currently practicing architecture in Zurich.

Reviews for Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City

The effect of Urban Code is a multimodal, almost helter skelter, accretive and cumulative, indirect yet structured, obvious and concurrently nuanced, simple while sophisticated, zen-like in its quiet message, yet powerfully provocative in its impact. —Stephen E. Roulac, New York Journal of Books