New Urbanism and American Planning presents the history of American planners' quest for good cities and shows how New Urbanism is a culmination of ideas that have been evolving since the nineteenth century. In her survey of the last hundred or so years of urbanist ideals, Emily Talen identifies four approaches to city-making, which she terms 'cultures': incrementalism, plan-making, planned communities, and regionalism. She shows how these cultures connect, overlap, and conflict and how most of the ideas about building better settlements are recurrent.

In the first part of...

New Urbanism and American Planning presents the history of American planners quest for good cities and shows how New Urbanism is a culmination of ideas that have been evolving since the nineteenth century. In her survey of the last hundred or so years of urbanist ideals, Emily Talen identifies four approaches to city-making, which she terms cultures: incrementalism, plan-making, planned communities, and regionalism. She shows how these cultures connect, overlap, and conflict and how most of the ideas about building better settlements are recurrent.

In the first part of the...

These twelve previously unpublished essays present innovative and practical ideas for addressing the harmful effects of sprawl. Sprawl is not only an ongoing focus of specialized magazines like "Dwell"; indeed, "Time" magazine has cited recycling the suburbs as the second of Ten Ideas Changing the World Right Now. While most conversations on sprawl tend to focus on its restriction, this book presents an overview of current thinking on ways to fix, repair, and retrofit existing sprawl.

Chapters by planners, geographers, designers, and architects present research grounded in diverse...