plus if anyone knows who is author I have to go for, tell me about them too.
thanks

after the city

stalking detroit

delirious new york

i'd say:

kevin lynch
"image of the city"
"site planning"
"what time is this place"
pretty much everything he writes.

italo calvino
"invisible cities"

koolhaas
"delirious new york"

those are must read and are pretty much at the top of my list.

but digging deeper, of course there are:

spiro kostof - "The City Shaped : Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History"

jane jacobs - "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

christopher alexander - "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction" - he also wrote a lot of stuff on the phenomenology of life in conjunction with nature and the order of things - a programmer's perspective. very interesting stuff.

edmund bacon - "Design of Cities"

and i think Jaime Lerner - an architect, town planner and former mayor of Curitiba Brazil is a very interesting person. i saw his talk at harvard a while back and found his approach of rebuilding Curitiba - where he said "the city is not the problem, the city is the solution" - very intriguing.

doug suisman's "Los Angeles Boulevard"
Forum for Architecture and Urban Design
Los Angeles: 1989

there is a book which i believe it titled "ladders" can't remember the authors name off the top of my head, I think he teaches at Rice or did if that helps.

THE CITY READER
edited by richard t. legates and frederic stout

I agree with many of hanimal's suggestions, and others here as well. "Mut reads," in my opinion, are those basic to the field---if you haven't read them, you won't be taken very seriously to others in the field. In this category:

Lynch's "Image of the City," and Jacobs "Death and Life..." are crucial. To this, I'd add Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier," which bursts a lot of myths about suburbanization---like it or not, a major factor of American urbanism.

Otherwise, you can't go wrong with Alexander, Bacon, Calvino and the wonderful Kostof. Happy reading!

duh...make that "Must reads"

bubble is right on, too: legates and stout's anthology is a great introduction to the big names in the field...many short (abridged) essays on a whole range of urban issues.

I do have Rem's "delirious New York" and also "Harvard Project on the city" too.
I am currently working on this urban/planning competition for city of Seoul: re-formation of future Seoul.
I hope these book might help me in a lot of ways
Thanks people

by Aldo Rossi

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi

'Too Blessed to be Depressed' by Crimson
architectural historians. Rotterdam.nl.

by Richard Rogers and Philip Gumuchdjian

"The City in Mind" by Kunstler

I thought this thread was trying to coin a new catch phrase for urban conditions, which aren't urban, hence "unbanism." Or it could refer to the condition of unbanality.

MOBILITY: A room with a view (The International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam 2003) NAI PUBLISHERS

Some not mentioned yet but certainly part of the discussion on urbanism:

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
by Lewis Mumford

Charter on New Urbanism by Congress for New Urbanism

Essay on Genericity by Rem Koolhaas

'After the city' by the lars lerup....a good read, seems to be a unique perspective on unzoned megalopolises like houston

'Suburban Nation' an even better read explaining the CNU's basic arguments (rather than actually reading the charter). whether you agree or not, this is one of the most influential movements today

Jane Jacobs or Kevin Lynch, I see these two as one and the same idealogy. Both are incredibly beneficial to understanding contemporary planning

'a pattern language' a tremendous number of cities design commision tenets directly follow those of this book.

'delerious new york' because it's written by such an influential architect. I dn't believe it to be that critical to understanding culture/media, etc.

'architecture and disjunction' tschumi begins to put transprogramming into and urban agenda. 'Event Cities' 1 and 2 are great follow ups

I must disagree with you regarding Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch, Melvin. While I hold both in very high esteem, the foundations of their work are greatly different. Jacobs focused on saving neighborhoods with her primary focus on its residents. In fact, Jacobs argues against the idea of a single "urban designer," which is exactly what Lynch was. Lynch focused on the physical form of the city and its iconography. Both have made a tremendous impact on contemporary urban planning and design but the two had very different ideologies. (In fact, many of Lynch's ideas about visual connectivity have been used to tear down the neighborhoods Jacobs rallies to protect.)

I'll add a few other books:

"Design with Nature" by Ian McHarg

"The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" by William Holly Whyte

"Life Between Buildings" by Jan Gehl

this article by doug kelbaugh is a great although [admitedly] biased synopsis comparing everyday urbanism, new urbanism and 'kool' urbanism:

http://www.periferia.org/3000/3paradigms.html

anyone heard about "transurbanism"?
any those experiments done by Lars Spuybroek of NOX.
I think that peception city as an self-refigurating organism is critical too.

can any one help me understand that if u are dealing any urban design project than how would u start to respond to it. i mean the start point for designing an urban design project. the methodology.
reading books is fine but how would u implement the theories. its a big question.

I think its out of print but its an essential...

Urban Text - Mario Gandelsonas

link

well, your response would depend on your critical reading of the city. where all this book-knowledge comes into play is that it lends depth to your recognition and understanding of urban issues and provides you with a set of critical tools to begin your study with. beyond that, its all your ballgame. there are no hard-and-fast rules to follow in the implementation of design strategy.

The articles in SMLXL:

'What Ever Happened to Urbanism?'
'Bigness, or the problem of Large'
'The Generic City'
'Atlanta'


Basically the book is a must-read, even more than Delerious New York.


ap

Collage City - Colin Rowe

Oh also..

City Branding - Michael Speaks
is fantastic

d.w.

there is a book called Transurbanism by NAI (articles by NOX and many others).
interesting enough.

...and what better way to understand the city than through its history?

History of Urban Form by A.E.J. Morris

...not to mention:
The Situationist City by sadler

not to mention 'not to mention'

I second the city reader and add the 'city cultures reader.'
also add in there 'loft living."

Joel Garreau's Edge City is a great book for understanding contemporary American urbanism. Unlike many of the otheres mentioned, it is descriptive rather than prescriptive in its intent... a good chaser for Kelbaugh's stuff.

Edward Soja. Postmetropolis.

Also, his other two books are pretty good reads: Thirdspace (applies Lefebvre to Los Angeles) and Postmodern Geographies.

also:

everyday urbanism. edited by Jonathon Chase and Margaret Crawford. (good book, but sometimes hard to find in bookstores...)