Representation of places : reality and realism in city design

People live in cities and experience them firsthand, while urban designers explain cities conceptually. In Representation of Places Peter Bosselmann takes on the challenging question of how designers can communicate the changes they envision in order that "the rest of us" adequately understand how those changes will affect our lives. New modes of imaging technology--from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models--allow professionals to explain their designs more clearly than ever before. Although architects and planners know how to read these representations, few outside the profession can interpret them, let alone understand what it would be like to walk along the streets such representations describe. Yet decisions on what gets built are significantly influenced by these very representations. A portion of Bosselmann's book is based on innovative experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley's Visual Simulation Laboratory. In a section titled "The City in the Laboratory," he discusses how visual simulation was applied to projects in New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto. The concerns that Bosselmann addresses have an impact on large segments of society, and lay readers as well as professionals will find much that is useful in his timely, accessibly written book. Before architects and city designers can begin to make changes in the actual physical environment, they must create representations of their designs. These can range from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models. Each presents an abstraction, reducing reality to facts that can be clearly conveyed. In Representation of Places Peter Bosselmann asks how the experience of a rich and complex world - both the world we know and the changed world designers envision - can be adequately communicated. The designers' representation of planned structures and their environment significantly influences what gets built. Can images accurately match a designer's conception to a future reality? In addition to providing a timely discussion for professionals of the relation between new technologies and strategies of visual communication, Representation of Places has much to offer the general reader interested in the form of cities. Peter Bosselmann outlines a critical, normative framework needed to evaluate representations of design.