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Margaret Crawford Professor Department of Urban Planning and Design |
Publications
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Nansha Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism in the Pearl River Delta
The Pearl River Delta in southern China is a notorious demonstration of the urban effects of rapid economic development. On the river's east bank, the Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen and Donghuan have produced a dense and chaotic urban landscape. On bulldozed land, factories, high-rise housing, and hotels crowd together along massive freeways. With the recent expansion of Guangzhou's urban boundaries, the river's west bank is slated for even more intensive development. The single barrier to this intensive urbanization is Nansha, located on the southernmost tip of the provence. Owned by the Fok Ying Tung Foundation, Nansha's twenty-two square kilometers lie at the geographic heart of the Pearl River Delta (PRD). The Fok Foundation is developing Nansha as an experimental city—an alternative to the frenzied development taking place in the rest of the region. Conceived as a laboratory for exploring new ideas about Chinese urbanization, Nansha has been under construction since 1990 and currently contains a wildly diverse collection of buildings and landscapes. Traditional Suzhou and French baroque gardens surround sleek glass high-rises. A temple to the goddess of the fishermen abuts a modern information technology business park. Abandoned sand and gravel quarries are scattered throughout Nansha. A Very popular, and highly exclusive golf club lies adjacent to forested terrain and existing villages. A hyper-contemporary museum and luxurious five-star hotel attract visitors from Hong Kong and Guangzhou, who arrive via new ferry services, bridges, and roadway connections. Unsure of its future direction, the Fok Foundation has asked us to evaluate its earlier experiments and chart a course for the next stages of development. This challenge was posed to thirteen students from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. The students came from three professional-degree departments within the GSD: Landscape Architecture, Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design. Over fifteen weeks, the design studio conducted research on urbanization and landscape change in the PRD, and within the Nansha site. The goad was to produce multiple scenarios for Nansha's future, including strategic development plans, transportation, landscape and open-space infrastructures, and designs for housing and other buildings.
Everyday Urbanism: Margaret
Crawford vs. Michael Speaks
Everyday Urbanism is one of three books in the "Michigan Debates on Urbanism" series that also features New Urbanism and Post Urbanism. Each book represents a distinct, inevitable, but still-emerging paradigm in contemporary urbanism, and is an elaboration on public debates held at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning during the winter of 2004. In this volume Margaret Crawford, co-author of Everyday Urbanism and Professor of Architecture at Harvard University, is the protagonist. She presents the case for an informal, bottom-up urbanism that celebrates and builds on everyday, ordinary life and reality, with little pretense about the possibility of a tidy or ideal built environment. Michael Speaks, Graduate Program Director at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and a widely published author, is the respondent. Rahul Mehrotra, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Michigan and award-winning Bombay designer, introduces and moderates the exchange. Essays by Margaret Crawford and Michael Speaks. Bulding the Workingman's Paradise
This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little-known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and places of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers' efforts to control and direct these forces. "In her brilliant exploration of company towns from 1790 to 1925, Margaret Crawford has created the definitive book on this major topic in American economic and urban history, as well as a model of fine analytical writing about the politics of design. Her work reveals the potential of architectural history to illuminate the contested terrains of housing, urban design, and social life."
edited by John Chase, Margaret Crawford, John Kaliski
The space of everyday urbanism is a rich and complex amalgam of wide boulevards and trash-strewn alleys, luxurious stores and street vendors, manicured lawns and dilapidated public parks; it is a product of the intricate social, political, economic, and aesthetic forces at work in the contemporary urban environment. Everyday space can be spirited, spontaneous, vital, and inclusive; all too often it is neglected by its inhabitants, ignored by city planners, and disregarded by critics. The essays collected in Everyday Urbanism offer both an analysis of and a method for working within the city in a volume that, in its multiple voices and evocative illustrations, itself mirrors the space of the everyday. The first section of the book, "Looking at the City," examines late-twentieth-century urban life: strip malls, edge cities, and rampant suburbanization. Discussions of the history, theory, and practice of city design underlie each text, and the traditional disciplines of urban planning and urban design are augmented by an emphasis on the primacy of human experience and a close observation of lived realities. The essays and photographic studies explore the city as a social product a kind of social geography to illustrate a new, multidimensional understanding of everyday space. "Making the City," the second part of the book, challenges the formalism of architecture and the abstraction of planning with projects that address specific topics, problems, and opportunities within the urban environment. Small public parks complete with dog drinking fountains, neighborhood places combining civic and commercial amenities, and the use of observation and improvisation in city planning are based on a consideration of daily routines and emphasize the importance of local communities and customs. Creative, improvised, experimental, both individual and inclusive—everyday urbanism is the space of public life at the turn of the twenty-first century.
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