The newest book from Ron Kasprisin of Langley has just been published.

“Urban Design: the composition of complexity” was released July 21 by Routledge Press, Oxfordshire, UK.

The book is an urban design textbook for planners and laypeople, and Routledge Press UK is a highly regarded academic and professional book publisher (known also as Taylor & Francis in the U.S.).

A Langley resident, Kasprisin is an architect and professor in the Urban Design and Planning Department in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments.

Kasprisin said the book, his fourth, is targeted toward people interested in planning and specifically urban design by first helping them understand the principles and elements of design composition (design review, policy makers, etc.). The book then explores the use of design composition in complex urban situations, thus the “composition of complexity” part.

“I use a famous quote by Pablo Neruda, poet, to essentially remind us the cities and communities are real, messy, complex — the result of economics, politics, fear and capitalism,” Kasprisin said.

“For designers to engage in meaningful design they need to recognize and confront that messy complexity, in many ways allowing the form-compositions to emerge from the debate, not be structured first and forced through any debate,” he explained. “This is grounded theory — the principle of uncertainty and the ways communities really work, in my opinion.”