Book, Understanding Cities: method in urban design[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Inaugural book in a new series from the publisher Perspectiva, Urbanidades Fraturadas, developed with professor Leandro Medrano, from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, Understanding Cities, by Alexander Cuthbert, maps, organizes, conceptualizes and develops the bases of urbanism as a field of knowledge structured on solid bases of knowledge, analysis and experiences. From Cuthbert onwards, designing for or in the city ceases to be an exercise guided primarily by common sense, instinct and sensitivity of planners, designers and urbanists to become a science that brings together several disciplines in correlation, constituting a model of design, planning and Powerful, critical and contemporary action dealing with physical and human aspects of life in society that considers the sociological, anthropological, psychological, historical, cultural and political elements that make it up, without simplifications. FOURTH COVER Understanding Cities is the last book in the trilogy by Alexander R. Cuthberg dedicated to inaugurating a broad and transversal field of knowledge within the scope of urbanism and architecture, standing up against a methodless and intuitive practice that is the order of the day . Against the dissolution of the definitions that once served to support the urban project, against the absence of principles that guide the discipline, “exhausted by the aestheticism and reification of cities”, and against its dehumanization. Cuthbert lays the foundation for an entirely new, holistic approach for anyone dedicated to the art of configuring, or reconfiguring, collective space. Throughout the work, history, philosophy, economics, culture, politics, gender, aesthetics, everything is brought to the center of the debate, in order to revive spatial imagination through the critical capacity that only human sciences are capable of providing. Contrary to what is still done, and how it is still taught, Understanding Cities invites us to leave behind the era of cold and unreflective technocracy to reestablish the value of the social over the economic sphere in our lives and in our living spaces and interaction.