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Summary: Urban Sprawl affects us all, whether we realize it or not.
Review: This book was as much a pleasure to read as light summer fiction. The tone of the writing was as if the authors were hanging out with you in your living room, sharing their insights on urban sprawl and its ubiquitous ramifications. I cannot recommend it enough, if this subject even remotely interests you.
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Summary: A Page Turner
Review: I picked this book up at a local bookstore and read it in just a few days. It may seem strange for a book about sprawl, but it's actually a page turner.Perhaps the most delighting aspect of the books is its use of pictures. Almost every concept has pictures of both good and bad developments. When you put the book down, you'll be amazed at how you think about development, even if you never cared about it before.
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Summary: Suburban Nation- Take Some Notes!
Review: If you are concerned in any way about urban sprawl, decreasing land value, increasing taxes and community costs, or even just about what is going on in Your town - This book is for you! Suburban Nation is written in a simple, easy to read manner. This book is made for the developer as well as the common lay person to read. Insights include wonderful facts regarding urban sprawl along with quotes from various books from years ago (that amazingly apply today!). Best of all, all facts are backed up with a large number of references. Footnotes at the bottom of each page help to clarify any questions one may have. Suburban Nation accurately and precisely compares our new suburb neighborhoods with traditional neighborhoods. Pointing out the affects on our children, finances and even community. Again, more than adequate references, footnotes and even pictures help the authors to best make their point! I highly recommend that EVERYONE should read this book. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
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Summary: Fascinating!!!
Review: Without getting mired in the politics rife in other reviews, I will just say that this book is extremely interesting. Having been fortunate enough to live most of my life in academic communities (necessarily pedestrian oriented) I have seen first hand the concepts that the authors are driving at. Mixed-use multi-density neighborhoods are vibrant thirving places to live, work and play, while the mondern suburb is simply a place to keep your stuff and sleep. I intentionally moved from an affluent suburban neighborhood to a less upscale intown duplex simply because I got tired of driving absolutely everywhere, despite owning an import sports car that is a joy to drive.
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Summary: Insightful!
Review: Think of a typical suburb, and you'll conjure images of congested traffic, tacky convenience stores and unattractive strip malls. This development pattern is suburban sprawl. Sprawl strictly segregates offices, homes, shopping centers and schools. Even simple errands require a car. Authors and urban planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk decry sprawl as a costly, inefficient and deeply unsatisfying way to live. Heavy traffic in boomtowns like Atlanta, Orlando, and Phoenix demonstrates sprawl's detrimental effects on the quality of life. The alternative is traditional neighborhood development, such as in San Francisco and Boston, where it's possible to walk to stores and take mass transit to work. This cogent, if strident, manifesto against sprawl includes both the ugly truth and the beautiful alternative. We... recommend this book to executives and anyone else interested in the future and well being of the suburban neighborhoods that house their businesses and their families.
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Summary: if you care about the future of America - read this book
Review: Not long ago, the US passed a landmark - more than half its population now live in some form of suburban setting. I remember reading at that time how some scholars were reappraising suburban living as not as bad as commonly thought (after all, how can half of America be wrong?). Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck show how America has been, to put it bluntly, collectively duped into believing the suburbs are good for them. The growth of the suburbs occurred as a result of the all-American search for a better life, which it promised to deliver. The problem is that it has failed to do so (as the authors extensively detail), yet our entire thinking toward growth and development has become so entrenched in the suburban model that we do not contemplate any other alternative. Before reading this book I would have thought that blaming the suburban setting for nearly every American social problem, directly or indirectly, was a bit of a stretch. But I changed my mind after reading it. As a friend of mine who also read Suburban Nation said, a lot of their statements are counter-intuitive: how can it be true that the suburbs are actually more dangerous than cities for children and teens? Why is a narrow street generally safer than a wider one? Why is it that more road building increases traffic, instead of lessening it?(etc.) But they have the data to back this up, and it's quite convincing. There are probably several books like this out there, but in my mind what makes Suburban Nation so valuable is that the authors are both academics and professional architects. As such, they not only have the background data and facts to support their arguments, but they understand the complex economics of the development market and the motivations of all the players involved. They know that it is not enough to just denounce suburbia, but that there must be an alternative market-based solution that actually delivers on creating the better life that most Americans desire. The best part is that this book actually provides a practical, comprehensive, and extensively detailed manual on how to build that the pleasant environment, and how everyone can be a part of making this happen. I guess in the end I am truly convinced because I grew up in suburbia, and since I currently reside in Europe I have a different perspective. I could never figure out why my hometown of Virginia Beach (which the authors rightly condemn in Ch. 1) was such a deadening, drab place to grow up in. There are no bad parts of the city, a good bit of wealth, and everything runs well. But despite all this, it's a soul-destroying place, and now I know why. I'm thankful we have a guidebook to create a better environment. Now we just need the willpower to make it happen.
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Summary: A return to what we know and love
Review: As a certified Feng Shui professional, a member of our town's Zoning Committee and an appointed member of our Landmark Commission, the book is practically a bible for me. Clarity, simplicity of text and diagram, easily readable photos with captions - these all make both quick reading and detailed study easy. This is the best book I know of to help the concerned citizen get active in re-shaping their community, in knowing that they are making a difference. We are a product of our environment. Duany and al show how we can manipulate the place we live so that it can and will sustain us. We are our communities, but we need to design them to meet our best selves.
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Summary: Sprawl is not the issue
Review: Rhia book describes a set of esthetics that purport to dictate desirable social goals. Can esthetics do this or perhaps more achievably can esthetics influence it. More to the point are the goals described in this book desirable. That depends upon who you are of course. I grew up in what new urbanists would probably call a paradise. It was a real community in which neighbours were really neighbours. People did sit on their verandahs and converse with their neighbours on the street. There was an understanding that one could borrow things if the owner wasn't using them. It was considered polite to tell the owner if he was there but if he was away one could just borrow the thing and tell him when he came home if one was still using it. In short it was everything new urbanism wants. This was in a moderately large city in Canada. There were two things wrong with this paradise: a) it was not about verandahs, facing the street etc. It was about control and conformity. The neighbourhood protected itself by frowning on unexpected behavior. There was an expected range of interests and an expected range of activity. If someone went out of this range, one could expect social sanctions unfailingly. The dark side of Jacobs 'eyes-on-the-street' is Foucault's 'gaze.' The neighbourhood worked as an exercise in power. The verandahs and street life were instruments of that power. Heaven help anyone who had non-standard interests. b) the neighbourhood was unsustaining. With the growth of the personal rights ethos, the ability of the neighbourhood to control its inhabitants fell away. No longer could the neighbourhood fathers take action to control petty teenage misbehaviour. Instead personal rights and social policy took these controls away from the neighbourhood and gave them to government agencies. As a result the neighbourhood is now perhaps not unsafe but definitely uncomfortable. No one leaves tools or equipment out now in case a neighbour needs to borrow it. Everything is locked up. The doors are firmly closed and neighbours now complain to the police instead of discussing thier joint problems. New urbanism seems to miss this point. Neighbourhoods are about local power. For some people this produces a comfortable paradise. For those slightly different it creates a jail of conformity. Some people thrive in it. Some peole will be stifled. Neighboourhoods are an exercise in hopefully beneficent control. Architecture does not create this control. It can destroy it certainly and make it impossible but it cannot create it.
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Summary: Most Important Book of our Time
Review: If Suburban Nation is not the most important book of our time, it certainly is among the top few! It shows how our neglect of the lost art of civic design has led to the ugly sprawl that is devouring the American landscape and causing more environmental destruction, crime, obesity, mental illness, loneliness, etc. etc. As hopeless as our situation in America seems right now, there is a partial solution that is very simple: return to the civic design prinicples that have worked for centuries that we only recently abandoned. The book tells how. It is not a book just for town planners and architects. It is incredibly fascinating, multi-disciplinary, and even funny. If I could ask every American, and every politician to read one book, this would be it.
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Summary: Suburban wasteland...and what to do about it!
Review: For decades now, America has been engaged in mindless, self-destructive "sprawl," poor (or nonexistent) planning, and social engineering on a massive scale (largely begun in the Cold War, with the intent of fighting and winning a nuclear war, believe it or not!). In this wonderful, sensible, well-reasoned, non-dogmatic book, the authors dissect the mess that we have created and offer practical solutions to build healthy, beautiful, livable communities again. Personally, I would describe this book more as "pro-community" and "pro-neighborhood" than "anti" anything - sprawl, suburbia - although those are worth opposing for the many, many reasons which the authors lay out. I bet you didn't know, for instance, all the reasons why suburbia actually is NOT, as the cliché goes, a "great place to raise a family." For one thing, far more kids are killed and maimed each year in automobile accidents, which are largely a suburban phenomenon, and suicide (which is exacerbated by alienating, isolating, sterile, autonomy-robbing, soulless subdivisions) then by inner city crime. And I don't think it's exactly a coincidence that ALL the school shootings over the past couple of years have been carried out by typical, bored, suburban kids with way too much time on their hands. Hmmmmm..... Although the subject matter might not seem too exciting at first glance, this book is actually highly readable, fascinating, and a great introduction for the non-technical person as to how we got where we are today in the way we live - and how to improve it! Besides architecture, history, and sociology, the authors offer numerous real-world examples from their extensive experiences which makes things come to life in a vivid way. Among other things, the authors describe how the automobile came to dominate to such a ridiculous, even comical (if it weren't so pathetic) degree in America, and how automobile travel is subsidized to such a huge extent that the true price of gasoline should probably be about $9 per gallon, if all the subsidies, pollution, medical treatment necessitated by car-related injuries, etc. were paid for at the pump. Instead, we pay the cheapest price for gasoline in the world, and - as a percent of income - nearly the lowest in our history. Unfortunately, even though these costs ARE paid by us all (one way or the other), pandering to car owners in suburbia continues to work politically. In my state of Virginia, for instance, the current governor came to power largely by promising "no car tax" - the exact opposite of what "Suburban Nation" recommends we should be doing if we want to have livable communities and a society that works for everyone. Besides our bizarre love affair with the automobile, the authors of "Suburban Nation" contrast traditional neighborhoods--"mixed-used, pedestrian-friendly communities" --where people of diverse backgrounds and economic levels interact, work, eat, play, and deal with each other (what a concept!), with suburbia, where housing, work, shopping, and public facilities are segregated from one another, so people are forced to drive everywhere, and where you might never have to deal with anyone much different (racially, economically) than yourself. What's important to realize, and the authors of "Suburban Nation" lay this out powerfully, is, just because things have been like this for several decades, IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, and things can be so much better! The bottom line is, we MADE it this way through government policy, powerful special interests (the automobile industry, big oil, road builders), and even racism. Who suffers from all this? All Americans, basically, although of course the poor, the elderly, and children (i.e., those who are the least able to fight back and least powerful) suffer the worst, as usual. Plus, of course, the cities suffer, as does the environment, and all of our quality of life. Reading this book got me energized and even inspired. I always knew I didn't like suburbia, and I got out of it as quickly as I could, but after reading "Suburban Nation," I now can explain exactly what was bothering me! I recommend that everyone who cares about their community and their quality of life (which should be everyone, I would think!) - get this book and read it. I bet you'll look at your own neighborhood differently after you're done!!
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