Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City

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Anne Mikoleit

Moritz Pürckhauer

The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011, English

Nonfiction, Urban Design

4.75 x 8 inches, hardcover, 112 pages, 130 illustrations

ISBN: 9780262016414

Suggested Retail Price: $18.95

From the Publisher. Cities speak, and this little book helps us understand their language. Considering the urban landscape not from the abstract perspective of an urban planner but from the viewpoint of an attentive observer, Urban Code offers 100 “lessons”—maxims, observations, and bite-size truths, followed by short essays—that teach us how to read the city. This is a user’s guide to the city, a primer of urban literacy, at the pedestrian level. The reader (like the observant city stroller) can move from “People walk in the sunshine” (lesson 1) to “Street vendors are positioned according to the path of the sun” (lesson 2); consider possible connections between the fact that “Locals and tourists use the streets at different times” (lesson 41) and “Tourists stand still when they’re looking at something” (lesson 68); and weigh the apparent contradiction of lesson 73, “Nightlife hotspots increase pedestrian traffic” and lesson 74, “People are afraid of the dark.”

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