What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Be both hedgehog and fox.  Know thousands of little details.  Know three big rules. The book shows examples of small things city comforts that make urban life pleasant: places where people can meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art that infuses personality into locations and makes them into places...read more

A companion volume to "Urban Design: Street and Square", this book focuses on decorating the city - how ornament has been used in the urban scene. It shows how the pattern and distribution of street and square and other major elements in the city can be enhanced by the judicious use of decorative surface treatment and by the careful placing of hard and soft landscape features. Case studies of city decoration are outlined to bring together the ideas discussed and to show how ornament and decoration can be used to emphasize the five components of city form: the path; the node; the edge; the landmark and the district.

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Product Description: Christine Boyer faces head-on the crisis of the city in the late twentieth century, taking us on a fascinating journey through theaters and museums, panoramas and maps, buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation, a complex cultural entity...read more

In addition to offering detailed information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, this volume identifies and examines fifteen of the finest streets in the world

This second edition has been revised and updated to include additional illustrations and two new chapters that examine improved street-tree planting techniques and the mechanisms for planning for trees in urban environments. The author questions Olmsted's well-known concept of bringing nature into the city, focusing instead on improving on nature through artful garden design. Throughout, the book's approach is to define the problem, establish the philosophical design basis, apply the design principle, and implement the planning and design.

Product Description: 2013 Reprint of 1945 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Camillo Sitte (1843-1903) was a noted Austrian architect, painter and theoretician who exercised great influence on the development of urban planning in Europe and the United States...read more

Sketches the life and achievements of the landscape architect against the historical backdrop of nineteenth-century America