David Grahame Shane

Recombinant Urbanism develops the urban-modeling techniques, first pioneered by Kevin Lynch, into a comprehensive framework for the fast-growing discipline of urban design. Covering the origins of urban design in North America and Europe, it discusses the main approaches that have evolved to deal with the fragmented contemporary city. It also looks at the influence of participatory planning processes, zoning codes, imagery, finance, and marketing on urban form. Shane describes how the very same forces at work behind the freedom of the individual have also led to a widespread urban dispersal. In the final chapters, Shane brings his argument up to date with an exciting and innovative vision of contemporary practice, in which urban actors combine urban elements in networked cities. While the urban-planning touchstones of pattern recognition, scaling, urban morphologies, and zoning codes remain at the fore, their role is stressed as a transient one. They are presented as ever-changing structures, subject to constant feedback and alteration by a changing cast of catalytic urban actors.

Providing a sophisticated and potent set of tools for urban designers and urban-design students, Recombinant Urbanism also recasts urban modeling as an effective method of augmenting standard architectural design practices in an urban context.

"A very important book. Shane...has made legible and sensible the reams of recent urban discourse for a general college reader. Because of this labor-intensive effort, this book will be accessible by undergrad architecture programs as well as graduate seminars in urban design and planning. Additionally there is a big interest in UD and UP theory in ecology and social science now, and because of Grahame’s generous writing style the book will cross over to these other disciplines....I can also speak to the international interest in this book...again Shane has made important urban theories and thinking more widely available to an international student audience....The legacy the book will have (will be in) convincing people that the design of cities matters, not in the overbearing and over-controlling sense of new urbanism, but in reinforcing the multiple possibilities of contemporary life.