This book explores a simple but powerful idea. The way we organize the ground of our cities impacts everyday life. In other words, the street systems, plot patterns and building arrangements we lay down on the ground influence, first, the main three-dimensional aspects of building fabrics and then, socioeconomic diversity and environmental sustainability. This scientific evidence is relevant not only to the analysis of past and present settlements, but also to the planning and design of future cities. This idea is explored in the world’s first megacity, a place with a singular role in the last two centuries of humankind’s urban history and with unique contemporary dynamics – New York. We argue that if the ground plan can make it there, it will make it anywhere.
Human settlements and the ground plan concept.- Part 1: On the ground
plan and building fabric.- A brief historico-geographical reading of New
York.- Street systems, plot patterns and building arrangements.- The ground
plans density and the building fabrics diversity.- Part 2: On the ground
plan and Socioeconomic and environmental dimensions.- On social diversity.-
On economic diversity.- On environmental sustainability.- Part 3: On the
ground plans change over time.- Analysing the past ground plan.- Planning
the future ground plan.- If the ground plan made it there, it will make it
anywhere.
Vítor Oliveira is the president of the International Seminar on Urban Form - ISUF, principal researcher with habilitation at the Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment - CITTA / FEUP, and professor of Urban Morphology and Spatial Planning at UL. He is associate editor of Urban Morphology, advisory editor of The Urban Book Series - Springer, founding editor of the Revista de Morfologia Urbana (2013-18) and past president of the Portuguese-language Network of Urban Morphology - PNUM (2011-13, 2017-23).
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