Designing The City: Towards A More Sustainable Urban Form

Designing the City Designing the City Towards a more sustainable urban form Hildebrand Frey London and New York First published 1999 by E & FN Spon Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Spon Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1999 Hildebrand Frey The right of Hildebrand Frey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-36243-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-37501-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0 419 22110 7 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Frey, Hildebrand, 1940– Designing the city: towards a more sustainable form/Hildebrand Frey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-419-22110-7 1. City planning—Economic aspects. 2. City planning— Environmental aspects. 3. Urban policy. 4. Urban ecology. 5. City and town life. 6. City planning—Scotland—Glasgow. 7. Glasgow (Scotland)—Social conditions. 8. Glasgow (Scotland)— Environmental conditions. I. Title. HT165.5.F74 1999 98–31105 307.1′216–dc21 CIP Contents Acknowledgements Introduction vii 1 Part One The Current Debate about the Sustainable City 1. What Urban Design Is and Why it is so Important Today 12 2. Compact, Decentralised or What? The Sustainable City Debate 33 3. Micro- and Macro-structures of a More Sustainable City 55 Part Two Application of the Model Urban Structure to Glasgow 4. Glasgow—A Typical Post-industrial City 121 5. Application of Micro- and Macro-structure: the Case of Glasgow 157 6. Strategic Design of Districts of the City of Glasgow 192 Epilogue 208 Index 215 Acknowledgements This book would not have come about in its present form without the help of a number of people and institutions to whom I owe my thanks. There are first and foremost my mentors—Professor Peter Reed and Professor Frank Walker from the Department of Architecture and Building Science at the University of Strathclyde and Professor John Punter at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Wales—who have tried, successfully or unsuccessfully, to keep my sentences short and my arguments, with which they may