Donald Appleyard

Donald Appleyard
Donald Appleyard
Born(1928-07-26)July 26, 1928
DiedSeptember 23, 1982(1982-09-23) (aged 54)
Athens, Greece
EducationMIT
Occupation(s)academic, author, City Planning Urban theorist
Employer(s)MIT, UC Berkeley
Notable workLivable Streets
SpouseSheila Appleyard
Children4, including Bruce Appleyard

Donald Sidney Appleyard (July 26, 1928 – September 23, 1982) was an English-American urban designer and theorist, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.[1]

Born in England, Appleyard studied first architecture, and later urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduation, he taught at MIT for six years, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked on neighbourhood design in Berkeley and Athens and citywide planning in San Francisco and Ciudad Guayana. Appleyard gave lectures at over forty universities and acted in a professional capacity in architecture and planning firms in the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States.[2] He died in Athens as a consequence of a traffic collision.[3]

His 1981 book Livable Streets was described at the time by Grady Clay, the editor of the Landscape Architecture magazine, as "the most thorough and detailed work on urban streets to date".[1] It contained a comparison of three streets of similar morphology in San Francisco, which had different levels of car traffic: one with 2,000 vehicles per day, the others with 8,000 respectively 16,000 vehicles per day. His empirical research demonstrated that residents of the street with low car traffic volume had three times more friends than those living on the street with high car traffic.[1]

Appleyard is co-author with Allan Jacobs of the paper "Toward an Urban Design Manifesto".

In 2009, he was named number 57 of Planetizen's Top 100 Thinkers of all time.[4]

  1. ^ a b c Project for Public Spaces: Donald Appleyard, retrieved 29 September 2011
  2. ^ Caves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 22.
  3. ^ Allan B. Jacobs, C.C. Cooper-Marcus and T.G. Dickert: "In Memoriam: Donald Appleyard, City and Regional Planning; Landscape Architecture: Berkeley", retrieved 29 September 2011
  4. ^ ranked 57.