The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards - Hardcover

Jacobs, Allan B.; MacDonald, Elizabeth; Rofe, Yodan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262100908 ISBN 13: 9780262100908

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Silver Award Winner for Architecture in the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. and Winner of the 2001 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. in the category of Excellence in Design and Production.

First built in Europe and grandly imported to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, the classic multiway boulevard has been in decline for many years, victim of a narrowly focused approach to street design that views unencumbered vehicular traffic flow as the highest priority. The American preoccupation with destination and speed has made multiway boulevards increasingly rare as artifacts of the urban landscape. This book reintroduces the boulevard, tree-lined and with separate realms for through traffic and for slow-paced vehicular-pedestrian movement, as an important and often crucial feature of both historic and contemporary cities. It presents more than fifty boulevards?-as varied as Avenue Montaigne, in Paris; C. G. Road, in Ahmedabad, India; and The Esplanade, in Chico, California—celebrating their usefulness and beauty. It discusses their history and evolution, the misconceptions that led to their near-demise in the United States, and their potential as a modern street type.

Based on wide research, The Boulevard Book examines the safety of these streets and offers design guidelines for professionals, scholars, and community decision makers. Extensive plans, cross sections, and perspective drawings permit visual comparisons. The book shows how multiway boulevards respond to many issues that are central to urban life, including livability, mobility, safety, interest, economic opportunity, mass transit, and open space.

About this title

About the Author

Allan B. Jacobs is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

The majestic, vital streets of European cities and world capitals are most often their grandest and largest in scale, like the Champs Elysaes. The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multi-Way Boulevards celebrates these thoroughfares, created in the 19th century and currently out of favor because of safety concerns and the devotion to vehicles-only roads. Yet urban studies professors Allan B. Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald, along with Jerusalem planner Yodan Rofe, argue that boulevards could play an important role in revitalizing blight by getting people back in the same places as other traffic. Barcelona's Passeig de Gracia, Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway, C.G. Road in Ahmedabad, India, and even the Esplanade in Chico, Calif., serve as important examples among the 200 b&w illustrations.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262100908
• ISBN 13: 9780262100908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 440