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Agenda for a Sustainable America
Agenda for a Sustainable America is a comprehensive book that assesses U.S. progress toward sustainable development and a roadmap of necessary next steps toward achieving a sustainable America.
Best Practices for Preservation Organizations
Best Practices for Preservation Organizations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides preservation easement holding organizations with guidance on the operation of easement programs and organizational best practices by applying Land Trust Standards and Practices.
Better Models for Development in Maryland
Authors Edward McMahon and Shelley Mastran offer practical advice on key issues facing communities throughout Maryland in Better Models for Development in Maryland, published by the Conservation Fund.
Better Models for Development in Pennsylvania
Better Models for Development in Pennsylvania is a 134-page book that offers officials and citizens dozens of ideas and examples of ways to balance conservation with economic development.
Breaking the Development Logjam
Breaking the Development Logjam from the Urban Land Institute explains in plain terms how developers and planners can involve the community in the development process using the latest community engagement tools.
Building Commons and Community
Building Commons and Community documents 45 years of the late Karl Linn's legacy creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. In this richly-illustrated landscape-format hardcover book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom to help people use the resources they find in their own surroundings to create welcoming shared spaces.
Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans
Planning the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita has been among the greatest urban planning challenges of our time. Since 2005, Robert B. Olshansky and Laurie A. Johnson, urban planners who specialize in disaster planning and recovery, have been working to understand, in real time, the difficult planning decisions in this unusual situation. As both observers of and participants in the challenging process of creating the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), Olshansky and Johnson bring unparalleled detail and insight to this complex story.
New Orleans has had to rebuild its buildings and institutions, but it has also had to create a community planning structure that is seen as both equitable and effective, while addressing the concerns and demands of state, federal, nonprofit, and private-sector stakeholders. In documenting how this unprecedented process occurred, Olshansky and Johnson spent years in New Orleans, interviewing leaders and citizens and abetting the design and execution of the UNOP. Their insights will help cities around the globe recognize the challenges of rebuilding and recovering after disaster strikes.
Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning
Planetizen announces the release of Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning, a new book featuring thought-provoking commentary and insights from the some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the field.
Creating a Vibrant City Center
This book from the Urban Land Institute will give you the key planning and design guidelines you need to create a lively, appealing city center in any metropolitan area.
Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages
Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages from the Urban Land Institute (2008) is a book that describes the inside story and details on how town centers were developed, what makes them special, and provides facts on costs, rents, land uses, and more.
Creating Walkable Places
Richly illustrated with color photographs, site plans, and diagrams, Creating Walkable Places: Compact Mixed-Use Solutions is a book from the Urban Land Institute that explains how to create pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use developments.
Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighborhoods
Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighborhoods offers detailed studies of socially diverse neighborhoods and evidence that such neighborhoods are better off than more homogenous neighborhoods. Author Emily Talen's analysis in this book shows planners and urban designers how their work can support diversity.
Ecological Riverfront Design
Ecological Riverfront Design puts forth a new vision for the nation's urban riverfronts and provides a set of planning and design principles that will allow communities to reclaim urban river edges in the most ecologically sound and economically viable manner possible.
Ecological Urbanism
What are the key principles of an ecological urbanism? How might they be organized? And what role might design and planning play in the process? These are the major questions addressed in Ecological Urbanism.
Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development
This new book provides a refreshing look at how American cities are leading the way toward greener, cleaner, and more sustainable forms of economic development.
In Emerald Cities, Joan Fitzgerald shows how in the absence of a comprehensive national policy, cities like Chicago, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have taken the lead in addressing the interrelated environmental problems of global warming, pollution, energy dependence, and social justice. Cities are major sources of pollution but because of their population density, reliance on public transportation, and other factors, Fitzgerald argues that they are uniquely suited to promote and benefit from green economic development. For cities facing worsening budget constraints, investing in high-paying green jobs in renewable energy technology, construction, manufacturing, recycling, and other fields will solve two problems at once, sparking economic growth while at the same time dramatically improving quality of life.
Fitzgerald also examines how investing in green research and technology may help to revitalize older industrial cities and offers examples of cities that don't make the top-ten green lists such as Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio and Syracuse, New York. And for cities wishing to emulate those already engaged in developing greener economic practices, Fitzgerald shows which strategies will be most effective according to each city's size, economic history, geography, and other unique circumstances. But cities cannot act alone, and Fitzgerald analyzes the role of state and national government policy in helping cities create the next wave of clean technology growth.
Lucid, forward-looking, and guided by a level-headed optimism that clearly distinguishes between genuine progress and exaggerated claims, Emerald Cities points the way toward a sustainable future for the American city.
Envisioning Better Communities: Seeing More Options, Making Wiser Choices
Randall Arendt's work has shaped a generation of planners, designers, and landscape architects. In Envisioning Better Communities, he brings his insights to a broader public, with a profusely illustrated demonstration of how local officials, planning commissioners, and everyday citizens can work to make their communities more attractive, more habitable, and more sustainable.
Despite the widespread acceptance of good design and planning principles throughout the professions, too many of our towns and rural areas remain needlessly ugly and inefficient. In side by side comparisons of similar places and kinds of buildings, Arendt shows that we need not live amid sprawling, characterless visual blight. Simple design choices and effective municipal decisions can have tremendous impacts on the quality of our communities.
Written in Arendt's well-known clear, accessible, nontechnical style, this book creates a sense of hope for those who face the everyday challenges of working with developers and landowners to create places that make economic, environmental, and aesthetic sense. Arendt shows us that with diligence, thoughtfulness, and care, we can make our communities better in countless ways.
Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of the Death & Life of Great American Cities
Here is the first book for young people about Jane Jacobs, a heroine of common sense, a woman who never attended college but whose observations, determination, and independent spirit led her to far different conclusions than those of the academics who surrounded her. Illustrated with almost a hundred images, including a great number of photos never before published (with many by Robert Otter), this story of a remarkable woman will introduce her ideas and her life to young readers, many of whom have grown up in neighborhoods that were saved by her insights. It will inspire young people - and readers of all ages - and demonstrate that we learn vital life lessons from observing and thinking, and not just accepting what passes as ''conventional wisdom.''
Getting Density Right
Getting Density Right from the Urban Land Institute is a book that describes tools used to better support compact development, including visioning, planning, and new regulations. Case studies profile the experiences of eight communities, the policy tools they used to encourage compact development, and the development projects built using the new regulations.
Getting Real about Urbanism
How do you create a flourishing, livable place appealing to residents and visitors of all ages, incomes, and backgrounds? Offering a ground-breaking alternative to uniform, ''cookie-cutter'' urban designs, Getting Real About Urbanism is a book that describes techniques for creating ''Real Urbanism'' -- designing places with personality that reflect what is distinctive and original in a neighborhood, district, city, or region.
Green Community: Essays on Community Health
Based on the National Building Museum's exhibit, Green Community is a collection of thought-provoking essays that illuminate the connections among personal health, community health, and our planet's health.
Green Metropolis
Just about everything you think you know about the environment is wrong. Solar panels, electric cars, ethanol, big urban parks, and locavorism aren’t green; traffic jams, congestion, office towers, and crowded cities are. Green is not the country home in Vermont with the compost heap and the photovoltaic panels; it’s the concrete high-rise in New York City.
In a persuasive and provocative challenge to established environmental thinking, David Owen’s Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability challenges much of the conventional wisdom about being green and shows how the greenest place in the United States isn’t Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York.
Owen—a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991—states that while most Americans view congested cities as environmental calamities, with their pollution, garbage, and gridlock, residents of dense urban environments individually drive, pollute, consume, and throw away less than other Americans. Residents of New York City—the most densely populated community in the U.S.—consume less electricity than the average inhabitants of any other part of the country, generate greenhouse gases at a level far below the national average, and rank last in gasoline consumption and first in use of public transportation.
New York City’s environmental efficiencies are the result of its extreme compactness: being forced to live in small spaces sharply reduces opportunities to be wasteful; gridlock and a scarcity of parking spaces makes driving prohibitive while proximity simultaneously renders walking, bicycling, and public transportation viable means of getting around. Put simply, it’s easier to be green in a crowded city. The ecological innocuousness of leafy exurban areas long favored by environmentalists is an illusion—spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel greener, but in fact it increases their damage to the environment. In the face of rapidly dwindling nonrenewable resources, we should not look to the country, but to the dense metropolis as a model of true environmentalism.
In a radical departure from environmentalist dogma, David Owen’s Green Metropolis redefines what it means to be green, and offers vital insights into how to make our way to a more sustainable future. In this eye-opening and meticulously researched polemic, Owen argues that sustainability doesn’t depend on the acquisition of fancy new “green” gadgetry or the advent of new energy-related technologies, but on
lo-fi solutions already at work in dense cities around the globe. We already have a good idea of what we need to do, or at least how to get started.
Publisher: Riverhead Books. ISBN: 978-1-59448-882-5
Groundswell: Stories of Saving Places, Finding Community
Published by the Trust for Public Land, Groundswell: Stories of Saving Places, Finding Community celebrates the role of land conservation in preserving community character and connecting people to the land and to each other.
Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change
In Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, a 2007 book published by the Urban Land Institute, a team of leading urban planning researchers report that the key to mitigating climate change is less auto-dependent development, and that key changes in land development patterns could help reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.
Incentive Zoning
Incentive Zoning from APA's Planning Advisory Service is a book that oulines how local governments can consider and draft guidelines that allow developers to build larger, higher-density projects in exchange for creating amenities to benefit the community at large.
Intown Living: A Different American Dream
The American dream of a single family home on its own lot is still strong, but a different dream of living and prospering in a major city is beginning to take hold. After decades of abandonment by the middle class, a detectable number of people are moving into urban downtown areas.
Keepers of the Castle
Based on interviews with more than 150 individuals who constitute a ''Who's Who'' of the world's leading real estate executives, this hardcover book examines the transformation of America's largest industry--real estate--and identifies the attributes needed by chief executives and other leaders who are guiding their businesses through profound change. This book identifies the leadership strategies of and lessons learned by leading executives who have survived the downs of multifaceted business cycles and profitably taken advantage of ensuing opportunities in recovery.
Published 2009. ISBN: 978-0-87420-101-7. ULI Order Number: K05.
Land Conservation Financing
Land Conservation Financing provides a comprehensive overview of successful land conservation programs -- how they were created, how they are funded, and what they’ve accomplished -- along with detailed case studies from across the United States.
Layperson’s Guide to Preservation Law
Layperson’s Guide to Preservation Law is a look at the various laws and regulations that protect historic resources, as well as laws governing nonprofit organizations and museum properties. The current edition, available through Preservation Books, has been revised and updated in 2004.
Lessons & Concepts for Advancing Community Wind
Lessons & Concepts for Advancing Community Wind (December 2009) seeks to advance the development of community-based wind projects in the United States by drawing keys to success and policy recommendations from three compelling Midwestern case studies.
Wind energy continues to experience double digit growth rates because of the relatively cheap technology and the widespread availability of wind resources, and numerous studies have now shown that locally-owned wind projects produce disproportionate benefits to the local community and region where they are built. This presents community wind energy development as a stand-out opportunity for communities across America to pursue locally-owned projects that will help meet their electricity needs and contribute to energy independence while also providing tremendous economic benefits.
Yet, relatively few are familiar with concept and structure of community wind. Moreover, many economic and policy barriers currently stand in the way of further development of community wind. The first section of Lessons and Concepts for Advancing Community Wind provides three case studies of community wind projects that have pioneered different paths to a community wind destination. These case studies tell the stories of Winona County and the City of Willmar in Minnesota and Miner County in South Dakota. Community leaders in all three communities worked tirelessly (and continue to do so in the case of Winona) to take an idea from concept to completion. Each experienced numerous and varying hurdles and developed different strategies to overcome those hurdles.
The second section of the report distills the experience of Winona, Miner and Willmar into several keys to success for community wind projects. Despite the different paths and experiences, three common characteristics define these case studies: vision, inclusion, and persistence. Yet community-wind project success is not simply a measure of community preparation or project leader determination. The presence of numerous barriers stands as the rule, rather than the exception to community-owned wind projects. Understanding those barriers is the first step to addressing them on a project level as well as policy level.
The third and final section of the paper outlines solutions to further advance community wind projects on a state-by-state and national level. Public policies have the potential to effectively address many of the roadblocks and difficulties identified in the case studies, and some non-policy solutions will play a major role, as well. Even simple changes in regulation stand to yield significant improvements in the opportunities and viability of community-based wind projects—especially in a sector as highly shaped by regulation and policy as electricity.
Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice
Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice is the all-new edition of the popular book, The Practice of Local Government Planning, which has been the valued resource for preparing for the AICP exam. This new edition helps the reader understand the complexities of planning at the local level, and prepare to make decisions in a challenging environment.
The book:
- Demonstrates the breadth of planning challenges, the diversity of solutions, and lessons from the past
- Describes the historical, governmental, legal, and community context of planning
- Presents the challenges that planners will need to address in the decade ahead
- Provides useful, current examples of leading planning practices
- Helps planners and nonplanners apply well-reasoned strategic thinking in their planning challenges
- Unravels the complexity of planning at the local level to help readers make decisions in a difficult environment
- Helps students of the profession bridge the gap between theory and practice
Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice focuses on emerging issues and future challenges, offering useful, current examples of leading planning practices. The organization and content of the book will help planners and nonplanners who manage the work of planners apply well-reasoned strategic thinking to their planning challenges, and will help students of the profession bridge theory and practice.
Making Smart Growth Work
This 170-page book provides an in-depth look at the underlying principles of smart growth, explains how developers and planners have applied them, and how the public and private sectors can collaborate to make smart growth effective.
Nature-Friendly Ordinances
Nature-Friendly Ordinances is a book written to help communities take affirmative steps to conserve and restore those biodiversity features of their environment that add value regionally and locally.
New Geographies of the American West: Land Use and the Changing Patterns of Place
Land Use and the Changing Patterns of Place is a sweeping diagnosis of land use trends in the West and a prescription for better planning and policy decisions. Authored by 2005-2006 Orton Family Foundation Fellow and University of Colorado-Boulder Professor of Geography, William Travis, this is the first book in a series that explores the complex land use issues underlying many of the nation's most pressing social problems while highlighting new models and visions for vibrant and sustainable communities.
New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, 4th Edition
The Fourth edition of New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide is the most comprehensive and up-to-date sourcebook on the ideas and techniques of New Urbanism ever published. Thoroughly revised and substantially expanded by the editors of New Urban News, this brand new book explains how New Urbanism came about, what its principles are, and how it is improving communities in the United States and other countries.
New Urbanism: Comprehensive Report and Best Practices Guide
This definitive reference on new urban ideas, practices, and projects from New Urban Publications, Inc. includes updates and new sections as well as more than 400 illustrations and tables, projects, plans, and renderings.
Open Ground: Effective Local Strategies for Protecting Natural Resources
The preservation of open space has captured the public's imagination. Disappearance of open space is associated with the general degradation of the quality of community life, and in a broader sense, what is happening to open space is what is happening to the local environment.
Planners Book Service Catalog
Planners Book Service, part of the American Planning Association's website, is the Internet's best source for books, reports, audio and video tapes, computer software, and curricula on planning and related subjects.
Planning and Urban Design Standards
Planning and Urban Design Standards is a comprehensive sourcebook on everything from regional plans to streetscapes. Edited by the American Planning Association and including extensive illustrations and concise explanations, this book is a quick reference focused on practical applications.
Planning Policy and Politics: Smart Growth and the States
Updating his two previous books on growth management in the states, John M. DeGrove examines the history and current systems for planning and smart growth in nine states: Oregon, Florida, New Jersey, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, Georgia, Maryland, and Washington.
Planning Support Systems for Cities and Regions
In Planning Support Systems for Cities and Regions, a book from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, editor Richard K. Brail invites the reader to join in a virtual dialogue with its authors -- educators, theorists, model builders, and planners -- about technology and the social context in which technology is employed.
Preserving Resources from the Recent Past
Preserving Resources from the Recent Past, a new Preservation Book by Jeanne Lambin from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, looks at the historic context of the postwar building boom, the special challenges of preserving this legacy, and some case studies of community successes.
Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Volume 3
Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Volume 3 from the Brookings Institution Press describes anew the changing shape of metropolitan America and the consequences for policies in areas such as employment, public services, and urban revitalization.
Remaking the North American Food System
Written by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability from University of Nebraska Press describes the many efforts throughout North America to craft and sustain alternative food systems that can improve social, economic, environmental, and health outcomes.
Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being through Urban Landscapes
''Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being through Urban Landscapes'' is a book from the Urban Ecology Collaborative (UEC), a group dedicated to cultivating healthy, safe and vibrant cites through collective learning and united action.
Revisiting Rental Housing
In Revisiting Rental Housing: Policies, Programs, and Priorities, leading housing researchers build on decades of experience, research, and evaluation to inform our understanding of rental housing challenges and what to do about them.
Smart Growth Policies Book
In the 2009 book Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy collaborated with 18 leading land use researchers and planners to measure and compare outcomes in four states with statewide smart growth programs (Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, and Oregon) and four states without such programs (Colorado, Indiana, Texas, and Virginia). The investigation reveals great heterogeneity. No state did well on all smart growth principles or on all measures, although individual states typically succeeded in their top priority policy area.
Sprawl and Politics: The Inside Story of Smart Growth in Maryland
Sprawl and Politics: The Inside Story of Smart Growth in Maryland, a book by John W. Frece, traces the evolution of the Smart Growth program from its substantive underpinnings to the political and public relations strategies needed to assure the program's adoption.
Sprawl Costs
In 1996, a team of experts undertook a multi-year study designed to provide quantitative measures of the costs and benefits of different forms of growth. Sprawl Costs from Island Press presents a concise and readable summary of the results of that study.
Strategies for Protecting Quality of Place and Expanding Economic Opportunity
Grow Smart Rhode Island has produced a briefing book, Strategies for Protecting Quality of Place and Expanding Economic Opportunity, that provides background information about a variety of issues that are critical for the state's healthy economic development, quality of life, and social well-being. The book also include Grow Smart Rhode Island's recommendations for state and local action on each of these issues, along with references for further information.
Suburban Transformations
Smart Growth advocates, environmentalists, and New Urbanists have all tried in their own ways to spread the message of reforming current land use patterns. Their solutions are often criticized for being overly prescriptive, opposed to growth, or nostalgic. Suburban Transformations from Princeton University Press offers an alternative to these practices while synthesizing many of the ideas and proposals that they put forth.
Sustainability on Campus
The MIT Press offers Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change, edited by Peggy Barlett and Geoffrey W. Chase. These personal narratives of greening college campuses offer inspiration, motivation, and practical advice.
Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature
Written by the chair of the LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) initiative, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature is both an urgent call to action and a comprehensive introduction to ''sustainable urbanism'' -- the emerging and growing design reform movement that combines the creation and enhancement of walkable and diverse places with the need to build high-performance infrastructure and buildings.
The Conservation Program Handbook
From 1988 through 2008, voters nationwide approved nearly $54 billion for park, open space, and other conservation purposes. Despite substantial funding for land protection, there has not been a book available to guide officials as they implement voter mandates, until now.
The Conservation Program Handbook, by Sandra J. Tassel, was researched and written in response to numerous requests to The Trust for Public Land from community leaders seeking guidance with how to effectively and efficiently conserve iconic local landscapes.
The Conservation Program Handbook provides all the information that conservation professionals need to initiate or evaluate a local conservation land acquisition program. The Handbook compiles and distills advice from a nationwide study of successful conservation efforts and includes a list of best practices for the most critical issues conservationists can expect to face. With useful, accessible information on how to make sound conservation choices in the best possible manner, The Conservation Program Handbook will increase the amount, quality, and pace of conservation being achieved by local governments across America.
Sandra J. Tassel is president of Look at the Land, Inc., a private conservation consulting firm based in Maryland. She has been involved in land conservation throughout her career. Prior to becoming a consultant, Tassel was the director of The Trust for Public Land’s Colorado office and a founding board member of the Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts.
The Great Neighborhood Book
Jay Walljasper's The Great Neighborhood Book, published by New Society, explains how any community can be improved and enlivened, not by vast infusions of cash, not by government, but by the people who live there. Through real-life stories, this book addresses such challenges as traffic control, crime, comfort and safety, and developing economic vitality.
The Green Quotient: ULI Collection of Interviews
From the Urban Land Institute (ULI) comes The Green Quotient, a book of interviews with cutting-edge thinkers around the world, based on The Green Quotient column that appears in Urban Land magazine.
The Learning Garden
The Learning Garden: Ecology, Teaching, and Transformation is a book that tells the story of building a campus ''Learning Garden'' over a series of cohorts of student teachers and environmental education students.
The New Politics of Planning
The New Politics of Planning from the Urban Land Institute is a new book that chronicles land use controls used in the past generation, and then describes recent trends that show how states are changing their perspective.
The New Transit Town
The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development is an edited volume that brings together experts in planning, transportation and sustainable design to examine the first generation of TOD projects and derive lessons for the next generation.
The Power of Social Innovation
Civic leaders across the U.S. and throughout the world are discovering creative ways to overcome the obstacles that seal the doors of opportunity for too many. These inspiring individuals believe that within our communities lies the entrepreneurial spirit, compassion and resources to make progress in such critical areas as education, housing and economic self-reliance.
Real progress requires that we take bold action and leverage our strengths for the greater good. The Power of Social Innovation offers public officials, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and individual citizens the insights and skills to create healthier communities and promote innovative solutions to public and social problems. This seminal work is based on Stephen Goldsmith's decades of experience, extensive ongoing research, and interviews with 100+ top leaders from a wide variety of sectors. Goldsmith shows that everyday citizens can themselves produce extraordinary social change.
The book explores the levers and guiding principles used by champions of civic progress who drive new organizations, new interventions or new policies to enhance social conditions. The Power of Social Innovation features illustrative case studies of change-oriented philanthropists, public officials and civic leaders. While all collaborate across sectors, they run both start-ups and established organizations such as the New York City public schools, United Way of America, the United Negro College Fund, and Teach For America. The book shows the catalyzing role each plays in transforming a community’s social service delivery systems.
The Restoration Economy
The Restoration Economy (Berrett Koehler, November 2002) is the first book to document the ''hidden,'' trillion-dollar-plus economic sector known as restorative development. This sector comprises 8 industries that are restoring our natural and our manmade environments (cities, highways, etc.) worldwide.
The Smart Growth Manual
Everyone is calling for smart growth, but what exactly is it? In The Smart Growth Manual noted new urbanists Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, who co-authored the acclaimed Suburban Nation, provide a thorough answer. This full-color manual, written with Mike Lydon, organizes the latest contributions of new urbanism, green design, and healthy communities into a comprehensive handbook. It is intended to be a central resource for those who aim to put smart growth into practice, and to assess the work of those who purport to do so.
The Smart Growth Manual presents a clear blueprint for developing cities and suburbs in the most user-friendly, cost-efficient, and environmentally sustainable manner. The authors explain how to create and enhance mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities as an alternative to suburban sprawl. They also cover preservation of natural amenities and the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Neighborhood Development standard.
With their landmark book Suburban Nation, Andres Duany and Jeff Speck “set forth more clearly than anyone has done in our time the elements of good town planning” (The New Yorker). With this companion volume, the authors have organized the latest contributions of new urbanism, green design, and healthy communities into a comprehensive manual, fully illustrated with the built work of the nation’s leading practitioners.
“Simply put, we believe that new places should be designed in the manner of existing places that work,” say the authors. “The old, dependable neighborhood structure is the very heart of smart growth. Its details are missing from most books on the subject, and they are not sufficiently emphasized in the LEED standards. Restoring the centrality of the neighborhood structure to the American environmental movement would be the most important contribution of this manual. It has been a struggle to relearn the full range of techniques surrounding good neighborhood design, but the last decades have witnessed great progress toward this essential goal. We hope that this manual gets us there sooner.”
The Transition Timeline
The Transition Timeline lightens the fear of our uncertain future, providing a map of what we are facing and the different pathways available to us. It describes four possible scenarios for the UK and world over the next 20 years, ranging from Denial, in which we reap the consequences of failing to acknowledge and respond to our environmental challenges, to the Transition Vision, in which we shift our cultural assumptions to fit our circumstances and move into a more fulfilling, lower energy world.
The practical, realistic details of this Transition Vision are examined in depth, covering key areas such as food, energy, demographics, transport and healthcare, and they provide a sense of context for communities working towards a thriving future. The book also provides a detailed and accessible update on climate change and peak oil and the interactions between them, including their impacts in the UK, present and future.
Use it. Choose your path, and then make that future real with your actions, individually and with your community. As Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins outlines in the chapter he has contributed, there is a rapidly spreading movement addressing these challenges, and it needs you.
The University as Developer
There Goes the 'Hood
In this revealing book, Lance Freeman sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: How does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman does what no scholar before him has done. He interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. His analysis suggests new ways of limiting gentrification's negative effects and of creating more positive experiences and equitable development for newcomers and natives alike.
Tomorrow’s Cities, Tomorrow’s Suburbs
Old city neighborhoods are growing at the suburbs' expense. Tomorrow's Cities, Tomorrow's Suburbs, published by the American Planning Association, analyzed metro areas and found that by 2000, older neighborhoods (pre-1940s) have made comebacks, while many suburbs have sunk lower in relative income than poor cities like Detroit.
Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices
The conventional wisdom says that we need strict planning to build walkable neighborhoods around transit stations – even though these neighborhoods are like the streetcar suburbs that were common in America before anyone heard of city planning.
Yet many of our greatest successes in urban design occurred when we treated the issues as political questions – not as technical problems that the planners should solve for us. The anti-freeway movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the anti-sprawl movement of recent decades were both political movements, and citizen-activists often had to work against projects that planners proposed and approved.
This book uses an intriguing thought experiment to show that, in order to build livable cities, we should go further than the anti-freeway and anti-sprawl movements by putting direct political limits on urban growth.
Political choices about how we want to live can transform our cities more effectively than planning.
Urban Design and the Bottom Line
How can you calculate the ''design dividend'' -- the added value generated from good design before an investment is made? This book from the Urban Land Institute (ULI) answers that question using verifiable figures and drawing on the experiences and lessons learned from developers, public officials, and designers.
Urban Design Reclaimed
In Urban Design Reclaimed, a forthcoming title from APA Planners Press, author Emily Talen challenges planners to reengage in urban design to ensure that it supports diverse, sustainable, vibrant and equitable communities.
Urban Sprawl and Public Health
Urban Sprawl and Public Health offers a comprehensive look at the interface of urban planning, architecture, transportation, community design, and public health. It summarizes the evidence linking adverse health outcomes with sprawling development, and outlines the complex challenges of developing policy that promotes and protects public health.
Visions of Smart Growth and Sustainability
Visions of Smart Growth and Sustainability is a comprehensive book about sustainable development from the Florida Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FLASLA). This 150-page-plus publication is available as a free download from the FLASLA website.
Visualizing Density
Landscape architect and land planner Julie Campoli and aerial photographer Alex S. MacLean have joined forces with the Lincoln Institute to create Visualizing Density, a full-color, richly illustrated book to help planners, designers, public officials, and citizens better understand, and better communicate to others, the concept of density as it applies to the residential environment.
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs
A timely revisitation of renowned urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs' lifework, What We See invites 30 pundits and practitioners across fields to refresh Jacobs' economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. Combining personal and professional observations with meditations on Jacobs' insights, essayists bring their diverse experience to bear to sketch the blueprints for the living city.
The book models itself after Jacobs' collaborative approach to city and community building, asking community members and niche specialists to share their knowledge with a broader community, to work together toward a common goal of building the 21st century city.
The resulting collection of original essays expounds and expands Jacobs' ideas on the qualities of a vibrant, robust urban area. It offers the generalist, the activist, and the urban planner practical examples of the benefits of planning that encourages community participation, pedestrianism, diversity, environmental responsibility and self-sufficiency.
Bob Sirman, director of the Canada Council for the Arts, describes how built form should be an embodiment of a community narrative. Daniel Kemmis, former Mayor of Missoula, shares an imagined dialog with Jacobs,' discussing the delicate interconnection between cities and their surrounding rural areas. And Roberta Brandes Gratz—urban critic, author, and former head of Public Policy of the New York State Preservation League—asserts the importance of architectural preservation to environmentally sound urban planning practices.
What We See asks us all to join the conversation about next steps for shaping socially just, environmentally friendly, and economically prosperous urban communities.
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