Common place: toward neighborhood and regional design

Abstract

This book is about bringing a greater sense of community and coherence to neighborhood and region. It champions physical structure that is simultaneously more diverse, more sustainable, and more legible than megazoned suburban sprawl or underutilized urban areas. It is also about our social physique and about bringing meaning to architecture and a sense of place to communities. It touches on the following: commerce and how our market economy needs repair if it is going to produce true wealth; how a region can maintain and architecturally celebrate its identities and its differences; typology or how the built environment can be physically and spatially understandable and cohesive; and postmodern urban theory, design, and practice, especially the New Urbanism. The book illustrates all of this in a series of design workshop, or charrette, proposals for the Seattle region.