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...

Because the world of community planning has evolved over the past two decades, the new edition of this book has been re-tooled and largely rewritten to reflect changes in land development patterns across the U.S., providing a greater amount of information on a wider range of topics. This edition expands coverage of town centers, commercial corridors, housing options, village and hamlet planning, and individual case studies. It also contains entirely new chapters on subjects not addressed in the first edition: form-based coding, visioning, sustainability, low-impact development, green...