People Places: Design Guidlines for Urban Open Space, 2nd Edition

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Book Description
Now available in an updated, expanded second edition, People Places is a fully illustrated, ASLA award-winning book that offers research-based guidelines and recommendations for creating more usable and enjoyable public open spaces of all kinds.

This new edition of People Places: Design Guidlines for Urban Open Space contains a chapter-by-chapter review of the literature, a completely new color-photo section, 50 new black and white illustrations, a new chapter on post-occupancy evaluation, case studies, and a discussion of accessibility issues, including ADA regulations and universal design. In addition, updated and new information on seven types of urban open space are included: urban plazas, neighborhood parks, mini and vest-pocket parks, campus outdoor spaces, in housing and outdoor spaces for the elderly, child-care, and hospital outdoor spaces.

Customer Reviews
If you are a not a specialist, this book is great., March 24, 2000
Reviewer: Stephen Lynne McKee (Williamsville, NY)
I read this book as part of a research project I was doing about the design of college campuses. I found it to be extremely helpful in my project and I plan on refering to it in the future; I am pursuing a Master's of Landscape Architecture. What I liked about this book is two-fold:

1. Each chapter is a self-contained guide to designing a plaza, park, campus, or playground with people in mind. This important to me becuase I try to focus my designs around the people who will be using them. Each chapter gives useful design tips and helps about the given topic.
2. This book was academic while remaining readable. The authors refer to studies relevent to the topic at hand, but do not become bogged down in theoretical nonsense.

I recommend buying it to anyone who would like a well-organized general design reference book. I would not recommend it to anyone who needs in depth information on any specific topic covered in the book. Check it out from the library if that is your intent.

• The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
  by William H. Whyte [ISBN: 097063241X]
  Instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces and have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.
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• Urban Open Space: Designing for User Needs (Case Studies in Land and Community Design)
  by Mark Francis [ISBN: 1559631139]
  Based on archival research; published case studies; site visits; and interviews with researchers, open space designers, managers, and users, Urban Open Space looks across several seminal studies to glean significant findings and design implications related to user needs and conflicts.
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• Public Places - Urban Spaces
  by Matthew Carmona, Steven Tiesdell, Tim Heath, Taner Oc [ISBN: 0750636327]
  Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject.
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• Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)
  by Simon Swaffield [ISBN: 0812218213]
  Here in the middle of the twentieth century we are left with, not the sterile dichotomy of the official academic theory, but a rich and...
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