An alley or alleyway is a narrow lane, path, or passageway, often reserved for pedestrians, which usually runs between, behind, or within buildings in the older parts of towns and cities. It is also a rear access or service road, or a path, walk, or avenue in a park or garden.
An apartment, flat, or unit is a self-contained housing unit that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are many names for these overall buildings. The housing tenure of apartments also varies considerably, from large-scale public housing, to owner occupancy within what is legally a condominium or leasehold, to tenants renting from a private landlord.
A town square is an open public space commonly found in the heart of a traditional town, and which is used for community gatherings. A square in a city may be called a city square. Related concepts are the civic center, the market square and the village green.
A townhouse, townhome, town house, or town home, is a type of terraced housing. A modern townhouse is often one with a small footprint on multiple floors. In a different British usage, the term originally referred to any type of city residence of someone whose main or largest residence was a country house.
A terrace, terraced house (UK), or townhouse (US) is a type of medium-density housing which first started in 16th century Europe with a row of joined houses sharing side walls. In the United States and Canada these are sometimes known as row houses or row homes.
Rittenhouse Square is a public park in Center City Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that is the center of the eponymous Rittenhouse neighborhood. The square is one of the five original open-space parks planned by William Penn and his surveyor Thomas Holme during the late 17th century.
Communal apartments are apartments in which several unrelated persons or families live in isolated living rooms and share common areas such a kitchen, shower, and toilet. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 after the October Revolution, to cope with the housing shortage, they nationalised luxurious apartment blocks from rich people to make them available to the proletariat.
Fitler Square is a 0.5 acre public park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States and a surrounding neighborhood of the same name. The square is bounded on the east by 23rd Street, on the west by 24th Street, on the north by Panama Street, and on the south by Pine Street. The neighborhood encompasses much of southwest Center City west of Rittenhouse Square and east of the Schuylkill River.
Squares have long been a feature of London and come in numerous identifiable forms. The landscaping spectrum of squares stretches from those with more hardscape, constituting town squares —to those with communal gardens, for which London is a major international exponent, known as garden squares. London's largest privately-owned square is Vincent Square, in Westminster, which comprises 13 acres.
On a residential area, a front yard or front garden is the portion of land between the street and the front of the house. If it is covered in grass, it may be referred to as a front lawn. The area behind the house, usually more private, is the back yard or back garden. Yard and garden share an etymology and have overlapping meanings.
Community Greens, sometimes referred to as backyard commons, urban commons, or pocket neighborhoods, are shared open green spaces on the inside of city blocks, created either when residents merge backyard space or reclaim underutilized urban land such as vacant lots and alleyways. These shared spaces are communally used and managed only by the residents whose homes abut them. They are not a public park, a private backyard, or a community garden; however, they can function as all three.
Park Crescent is at the north end of Portland Place and south of Marylebone Road in London. The crescent consists of elegant stuccoed terraced houses by the architect John Nash, which form a semicircle. The crescent is part of Nash's and wider town-planning visions of Roman-inspired imperial West End approaches to Regent's Park. It was originally conceived as a circus (circle) to be named Regent's Circus but instead Park Square was built to the north. The only buildings on the Regent's Park side of the square are small garden buildings, enabling higher floors of the Park Crescent buildings to have a longer, green northern view.
Park Square is a large garden square or private appendix to Regent's Park in London and is split from a further green, the long northern side of Park Crescent, by Marylebone Road and (single-entrance) Regent's Park tube station. It consists of two facing rows of large, very classically formed, stuccoed, terraced houses with decorative lower floor balconies and a colonnade of consecutive porticos by architect John Nash, and was built in 1823–24. Alike, shorter-length terraces flank its corners at right angles, equally Grade I listed buildings: Ulster Terrace, Ulster Place, St Andrew's Place and Albany Terrace.
East Village is an area in Stratford, East London that was designed and constructed as the Olympic Village of the 2012 Summer Olympics and has been converted for use as a new residential district, complete with independent shops, bars and restaurants. The area was formerly contaminated waste land and industrial buildings to the north of Stratford town centre. More than 7,000 people now live in the area.
In British usage, the term townhouse originally referred to the opulent town or city residence of a member of the nobility or gentry, as opposed to their country seat, generally known as a country house or, colloquially, for the larger ones, stately home. The grandest of the London townhouses were stand-alone buildings, but many were terraced buildings.
The Internationale Begegnungszentrum der Wissenschaft is a residential building for both international scientists at the Free University of Berlin and the Max Planck Society and fellows of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It is located at the Wiesbadener Straße in Berlin Wilmersdorf. The IBZ Berlin is a founding member of the Network of the Internationale Begegnungszentren der Wissenschaft, an association of international guesthouses (IBZs) and university-related guesthouses in Germany. The 25 million Marks used to fund the IBZ, have been generously provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Land Berlin. Between 2010 and 2011 the building was renovated with the financial support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
A byelaw terraced house is a type of dwelling built to comply with the Public Health Act 1875. It is a type of British terraced house at the opposite end of the social scale from the aristocratic townhouse but a marked improvement on the pre-regulation house built as cheap accommodation for the urban poor of the Industrial Revolution. The term usually refers to houses built between 1875 and 1918.
The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association is a charity in London for the purposes of the preservation of public parks and gardens, established in 1882. It facilitated the creation of new public open spaces, including from philanthropic landowners within its membership. The MPGA was involved in the formation and development of other amenity organisations. The charity still exists; in recent decades its emphasis has changed to smaller parcels of land and smaller projects within larger spaces, as well as to themed projects. The MPGA was the starting point for the careers of the ground-breaking female landscape gardeners Fanny Wilkinson and Madeline Agar.
Collingham Gardens is a garden square in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London. Built between 1881 and 1888, the buildings on either side of the garden were designed by Ernest George and Peto, a firm that grafted Northern European urban motifs onto plainer Queen Anne style stock.
