Peter Cookson Smith Books

Focusing on urban design, the book explores how contemporary Asian cities integrate new and established growth drivers, such as residential developments and technology parks. It highlights emerging spatial patterns from urban expansion and regeneration, shaped by both formal and informal processes. The text delves into local morphology, emphasizing the importance of streets, blocks, and monuments in forging new urban identities that reflect evolving cultural landscapes. Ultimately, it advocates for a future-oriented urban design that honors historical context, enhancing livability and quality of life.

An imaginative means of looking at the city of Barcelona and its modern history from a new perspective; a series of drawings injected within the text, illustrating growth and change in the city fabric over almost two hundred years.

The book focusses initially on the philosophical, artistic and scientific forces that impacted on the humanism of the late Medieval and Renaissance period.

The book takes as its starting point the city of Canton, at the heart of the most populous built-up metropolitan area in Mainland China, and a city that has for several centuries held a central position with regard to economic, social, and physical change in the country.