The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards

by Allan B. Jacobs, Elizabeth MacDonald

A celebration of the multiway boulevard and an argument for its revival, with design guidelines and historic examples. First built in Europe and grandly imported to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, the classic multiway boulevard has been in decline for many years, victim of a narrowly focused approach to street design that views unencumbered vehicular traffic flow as the highest priority. The American preoccupation with destination and speed has made multiway boulevards increasingly rare as artifacts of the urban landscape. This book reintroduces the boulevard, tree-lined and with separate realms for through traffic and for slow-paced vehicular-pedestrian movement, as an important and often crucial feature of both historic and contemporary cities. It presents more than fifty boulevards—as varied as Avenue Montaigne, in Paris; C. G. Road, in Ahmedabad, India; and The Esplanade, in Chico, California—celebrating their usefulness and beauty. It discusses their history and evolution, the misconceptions that led to their near-demise in the United States, and their potential as a modern street type. Based on wide research, The Boulevard Book examines the safety of these streets and offers design guidelines for professionals, scholars, and community decision makers. Extensive plans, cross sections, and perspective drawings permit visual comparisons. The book shows how multiway boulevards respond to many issues that are central to urban life, including livability, mobility, safety, interest, economic opportunity, mass transit, and open space.

Genres: Urban Planning, Cities, Architecture, Urban Design, Transport, Nonfiction, Urbanism

268 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Allan B. Jacobs was an urban designer, renowned for his publications and research on urban design. His well-known paper "Toward an Urban Design Manifesto", written with Donald Appleyard, describes how cities should be laid out.
Prior to teaching at Berkeley, Professor Jacobs taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked on planning projects in the City of Pittsburgh and for the Ford Foundation in Calcutta, India, and spent eight years as Director of the San Francisco Department of City Planning. In 1978 Jacobs presented his ‘Making City Planning Work’ that offered reflections on his experiences as the San Francisco planning director from 1967 to 1975 and guided on bureaucratic and political processes navigation that often hamper the realization of desired planning policies and outcomes.
His other books include ‘Looking at Cities’ (1985); ‘Great Streets’ (1993) and ‘The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards’ (with Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofé, 2003), which both offer case studies that reveal the key elements of successful streets; and ‘The Good City: Reflections and Imaginations’ (2011), a compendium of his career and thinking about cities. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berkeley Citation, and the Kevin Lynch Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jacobs taught in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley from 1975 until 2001, teaching courses in city planning and urban design and serving twice as the department's chair. He then became a Professor emeritus and a consultant in city planning and urban design with projects in California, Oregon, and Brazil, among others.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a girlie magazine for urban planners. Drawings of streets from around the world. Big streets! Streets with trees! Streets with trains running down the middle!

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must for urban planners and designers, transportation planners, and traffic and civil engineers.

[Fulay · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good book for urban planners.

[Nicholas Kalogeresis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still relevant today as transportation planning has made big strides since the book was published.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book with lots of good plans to help explain there ideas. Documents the rise and fall and hofefully rebirth of the boulevard as an urban design element.