The Urban Oasis: Guideways and Greenways in the Human Environment - Hardcover

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Can urban places once again be savored? The automobile allows us to scatter our urban development over the landscape on an unprecedented scale. With decentralization, we drain the economic and cultural life out of our cities. We also consume more virgin land and fuel in transportation than ever before in human history-while contributing far more than our share to global warming. At the same time, world population pressures are relentlessly increasing. The confluence of population growth and the car culture, notes architect Roxanne Warren, presages massive degradation of the environment of humans and other living creatures. The Urban Oasis is a thoughtful, brilliant book that demonstrates way we can begin to free ourselves from our dangerous dependence on private motoring, and to create truly livable communities into the future. In describing the components of the Oasis, Warren dreaws on numerous examples of pedestrian zones in europe, North American, and Asia, and of new automated guideway transit links that are functioning worldwide. By allowing efficient access to off-site parking, such links will permit the provision of locally green environments, and thus the melding of the advantages of urban and rural living. The author bridges the barriers that have typically existed between the humanist and technical realms, placing new transportation technologies with the context of ecological and social concerns and priorities. The technical material is kept accessible to the lay reader, yet enlightning for architects and planner. It is the interweaving of these realities and potential solutions that is the unique contribution of this book.