Routledge Urbanism and Transport: Building Blocks for Architects and City and Transport Planners

Helmut Holzapfel’s Urbanism and Transport, a bestseller in its own country, now available in English, examines the history and the future of urban design for transport in major European cities. Urbanism and Transport shows how the automobile has come to dominate the urban landscape of cities throughout the world, providing thought-provoking analysis of the societal and ideological precursors that have given rise to these developments. It describes the transformation that occurred in urban life through the ongoing separation of social functions that began in the 1920s and has continued to produce today's phenomenon of fractured urban experience – a sort of island urbanism.Professor Holzapfel examines the vital relation between the house and the street in the urban environment and explains the importance of small-scale, mixed-use urban development for humane city living, contrasting such developments with the overpowering role that the automobile typically plays in today's cities. Taking the insights gained from its historical analysis with a special focus on Germany and the rise of fascism, the book provides recommendations for architects and engineers on how urban spaces, streets, structures and transport networks can be more successfully integrated in the present day.Urbanism and Transport is a key resource for architects, transport engineers, urban and spatial planners, and students providing essential basic knowledge about the urban situation and the challenges of reclaiming cities to serve the basic needs of people rather than the imperatives of automobile transport. Review "This is a remarkable contribution to a debate that is often technocratic and dominated by traffic engineers and Holzapfel very successfully shows that a much better city is on offer; it is cheaper to run, more equal and more diverse with more social interaction and we can rediscover this spirit and purpose if we focus on the street." – World Transport Politics and Practice"This provides a much-needed historical exposition of the appropriation of the street by the private car. In effect, it provides a fundamental critique of the discipline of transport planning as it has developed over the years – many of the arguments made are much too seldom heard in the transport planning world, if at all.Transport is viewed throughout as a cultural phenomenon – with travel behaviour and the purchase of the private car seen as a social construct, reflecting the images associated with it, and framed as an integral part of human culture." – Rick Hickman, Barlett School of Planning, University College London, UK, Journal of Geography About the Author Helmut Holzapfel studied civil engineering, first working in leading positions from 1980–1993 as a transport scientist in research groups and later as an official at the Transport Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Since 1993 he has been a professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Urban and Landscape Planning at the University of Kassel, Germany, and since 2009 has lead the research project "Sintropher" in close collaboration with Sir Peter Hall. Urbanism and Transport was published in German as Urbanismus und Verkehr and went on to become one of the bestselling books on urban and transport planning.