Urban and environmental e-books arrive

In the past three years, the stream of books useful to new urbanists and smart-growth advocates has turned into a torrent. And now, something a bit different is being added to the flow of information: a series of short e-books on topics having to do with the environment (including urbanism, planning, and transportation).

In April, Island Press released its first e-book—Making Transit Fun! by Darrin Nordahl, who, until his return to Northern California this year, was city designer at the Davenport (Iowa) Design Center. Nordahl earlier achieved notice with two print books: My Kind of Transit (praised in the Dec. 2009 New Urban News) and Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture (reviewed in March 2010).

In June, Island released its second e-book—Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities) by San Francisco architect and Congress for New Urbanism co-founder Daniel Solomon. A wry and learned observer of architecture and culture, Solomon, too, had earlier written well-received print books, most notably Global City Blues, reviewed in our pages in June 2003.

Nordahl’s 126-page e-book, subtitled How to Entice Motorists from Their Cars (and Onto Their Feet, a Bike, or Bus), asks questions like these: “How can we expect people to want to ride the bus when it is the homeliest vehicle on the road, offering the most ordinary of experiences? How can we expect people to walk to the store when our streets are ugly and hostile?”

To the first question, he responds in part: make the transit experience a thing of joy. “Joy helps transit compete against the allure of the automobile. ... The fun factor—inherent in the automobile—is what is missing in public transit today.”

“Only when transit snares popular affection will people fight for it,” Nordahl asserts. “But right now, no one is fighting to preserve the experience of riding the bus.”

Four examples

Here are some examples of how transit in some parts of the world has  become fun:

• Engineers outfitted the stair treads leading from an underground transit station in Stockholm with black and white pressure-sensitive sensors—turning them into “a fully functional piano keyboard. As one steps on each stair, the corresponding note is played.”

• In Copenhagen, during a two-week marketing campaign, cozy Koerlighedssoeder (Danish for “love seats”) attracted passengers feeling a bit flirtatious. The mood on the bus lightened noticeably. “Often,” says Nordahl, ”the biggest challenge we face is just getting the motorist to try transit, and that is where fun marketing stunts like the Koerlighedssoeder succeed.”

• A bus in the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa has a front that “looks like it was extracted from a Peterbilt semi,” and a rear with a rounded tail and split rear window that “takes styling cues from a 1939 Studebaker.” The rear is further embellished with a 1950s Continental Kit, accentuated at night with neon-style lighting. The whole thing is painted a strong color, blaze orange, making it stand out from every other vehicle on the road. Inside, a glass ceiling extends the entire length of the passenger cabin, bathing the interior in natural light and generating “a grand sense of spaciousness.”

• San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center, scheduled to open in 2017, will, says Nordahl, be a sexy, multilevel structure with sinuous curves, lush landscaping, seductive water displays, and interconnected, well-appointed public spaces, including a 5.5-acre city park on its roof (where people will find a café, a plaza, an amphitheater, lily ponds, and large grassy areas).

Solomon’s take on cities

Solomon’s Bedside Essays consists of five essays on what it means to be “a continuous city.” As Solomon sees it, American cities in the second half of the twentieth century mainly chose either to erase their existing structures and build anew or to decentralize and sprawl. The result: a rupture that was “both an upheaval in ideas about cities and their organization, and actual physical rupture that left American towns full of holes and gaps that were never there before.”

A better choice, he says, would be for the city to build “upon and within itself, reaching toward the future while guided by the past.” In a continuous city, he says, “the living honor the dead and make sure that the unborn get to know them. New buildings, new institutions, new technologies in the continuous city don’t rip apart the old and wreck it. ... they add vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.”

“What the sustainable city must sustain is the culture of the city: the way people cook in New Orleans, the way they dress in Milan, dance in Havana, speak in London, wisecrack in New York, look cool in Tokyo,” says Solomon. “Those things just don’t grow in the non-space no-place of the virtual community without propinquity. It is dull out there—dull, dull, dull—and we have proven that to ourselves over and over, from Milton Keynes [new town in England] to Tysons Corner to the outskirts of Beijing.”

Solomon points out some of the continuous city’s victories over the past few centuries—ranging from garden apartments in the Bronx to an Italian church woven into a Roman intersection. He argues that modernism, from Rem Koolhaas’s design of China’s Central Television Studio to the first two weeks of the curriculum at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, embraces flawed, obsolete ideals at the cost of urban identity.

The E-ssential idea

The series, called Island Press Essentials, is based on the concept that “knowledge and information needs to be more immediate, accessible, and widely available in whatever form is most useful.”

The nonprofit publisher says electronic-only books, sold for $3.99 through retailers such as Amazon, Apple, B&N Nook, Google, Sony, and Kobo, will offer “those working on environmental issues the opportunity to share their latest research and ideas quickly and efficiently in forms that have the greatest reach and impact.”

E-books will be published about once a month and are intended to be “short enough to be read in a couple of hours, but long enough for genuine complexity,” the press says. The authors are to be leaders in “ecosystem conservation and management, the built environment, energy, health, and other areas.”