Designing Small Parks: A Manual for Addressing Social and Ecological Concerns provides guidelines for building better parks by integrating design criteria with current social and natural science research. Small parks are too often relegated to being the step-child of municipal and metropolitan open space systems because of assumptions that their small size and isolation limits their recreational capacity and makes them ecologically less valuable than large city and county parks. This manual is arranged around twelve topics that represent key questions, contradictions, or tensions in the...

The "new community" movement of the 1960s and 1970s attempted a grand experiment in housing. It inspired the construction of innovative communities that were designed to counter suburbia's cultural conformity, social isolation, ugliness, and environmental problems. This richly documented book examines the results of those experiments in three of the most successful new communities: Irvine Ranch in Southern California, Columbia in Maryland, and The Woodlands in the suburbs of Houston, Texas.
Based on new research and interviews with developers, designers, and residents, Ann Forsyth traces...

Examining the debate between activists and professional planners over the vision of the future of a large growth corridor in Sydney, Australia, this case study maps the history of development from the late sixties to the mid-nineties, during which time serious environmental and financial problems arose. The book outlines five major visions of the future development and examines forms of political, economic, and institutional power applied by the parties in the project, with emphasis on the processes of infrastructure privatization and ecological impacts. The conclusion reflects on...