Customer Reviews

The Smart Growth Manual

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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Authors Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, and Mike Lydon have created The Smart Growth Manual, a resource which not only explains the overarching ideals of smart growth, but a manual that takes the time to show smart growth principles at each geographic scale (region, neighborhood, street, building). The Smart Growth Manual bounces back and forth (in a beautifully organized manner) between steps for the implementation of smart growth and key concepts. The format of The Smart Growth Manual allows for each concept to be referenced and reviewed quickly (each concept is explained in about half a page).

I found The Smart Growth Manual to be the type of reference that you would throw in your bag before heading to your community association meeting or grab on your way to a city council hearing about a new development. The information is presented in such a simplistic, uncluttered format that you can use it almost like a dictionary. Instead of wondering whether a particular idea really is smart growth you can flip to it in the manual and understand how the concept would work and how it relates to other principles of smart growth. More importantly it can be used to better articulate community goals through providing an accessible guide to smart growth in an attainable format for charrettes, community meetings, etc.

To make The Smart Growth Manual all the more enticing, the pages are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper and it's pretty much pocket sized (so you don't have to lug around yet another huge manual in addition to ordinances and the like). The pages feature vivid illustrations and photographs of each concept so it's not a struggle to understand or explain a concept. I highly recommend The Smart Growth Manual as a part of any community participant's or urban planner's desktop references.

Duany and company are architects so their focus on design is highly useful. Echoing other on-the-ball reviewers here, the book is very well organized, easy to follow and leads directly to application.

If the authors ever read customer comments, I would like to suggest the following should the book be updated:

1. Our country's population is growing, but it also aging. Over the next 20 years, the aging of the population may be more significant to planners than "just" growth (which is inevitable, despite the silly claims of other reviewers). There has to be a "Smart Aging" perspective this country needs to adopt because older Americans have different needs--not lesser needs, different needs that should be addressed.

2. Include a section on the behavioral side of Smart Growth--while a necessary component of getting people out of their cars, design by itself is insufficient to get people out of their cars. What incentives, what kind of education and outreach needs to take place for the public and, perhaps most importantly, elected officials. Most local officials aren't particularly brave. They need help.

This book is likely to change things. It works from both sides: for planners and politicians to teach themselves and others, and for citizens concerned about what planners might do. It will help planners get new visions across. And help them ease valid citizen concerns and even NIMBY concerns. It conveys concepts by showing reality ... which sounds very good no matter what side you are on. I studied urban planning 30+ years ago and walked away from it as it seemed more wrong than right. This book will go a long way to making things right.

Finally, after a dozen years of discussion about sprawl versus smart growth, the definitive manual is here. Andrés Duany, Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon have written an artfully concise, universally accessible handbook that balances basic concepts with complex details. The book mixes substantial "best planning practice" and development wisdom with brilliant insight. It proves (by describing observable cause and effect), that championing smart growth will result in highly livable places that are also environmentally and economically sustainable.

Each page-long tutorial features a title, a half-page of understandable text and an illustrative photograph or diagram. The subjects are rationally organized by scale, from the region to the neighborhood to the lot and building. The rural to urban transect is described near the beginning as an organizing system for planning. Like the transect itself, the book integrates environmental, design, building development and financial concerns.

The United States has long needed a "how to" catalogue for growth that can also serve to measure the quality of development. This book is it. If followed, it could literally change the American landscape and our long-term future for success.

"The Smart Growth Manual" should be distributed nationwide to elected officials, governments, developers, planners, architects and community activists.

As the newest member of my town's Historic and Design Review Commission, I've been scrambling to become better-acquainted with architectural terms and philosophies. Because my area of expertise is in landscaping, and I'm primarily on the commission to help evaluate the landscape plans, I've been feeling behind when it comes time to comment on the buildings themselves or the relationships between the buildings and their surroundings. I've also been working to understand the goals behind many of the city's policies so I can best help analyze the plans that come before me, in light of what the city hopes to achieve.

The Smart Growth Manual has been an invaluable tool in becoming familiar with the basic concepts of smart growth that my city seems committed to. Each page has a couple of paragraphs on a specific concept, along with a photo illustrating an ideal or not-so-ideal example of it. The writing is smooth and clear, and it is written in jargon-free language that's easy to understand even after a long day of hard physical work.

I expected that as a layman, not an architect, I might struggle to understand some of the terms or concepts, but the beauty of this book is in its simplicity. I read it in three sittings, and have gone back and paged through it multiple times since finishing it to re-absorb the most compelling and relevant concepts. After reading, many of the policies and projects my city is working on made more sense, and I was able to understand more deeply WHY certain projects were so important and what the end results would be in creating a livable, walkable, human-scale town.

If you're looking for simple, common-sense explanations of planning concepts, this book is an excellent place to start. You won't come away an expert, but this is a thorough, approachable book that gives you a broad overview of a variety of important concepts in the field.

This book of Andres Duany and Jeff Speck complements and ratifies, clearly, the concepts expressed by the journalist Jane Jacobs (The death and life of great american cities) on the "health " of contemporary urban dwellers.
His reading is essential for anyone who wants to know more about cities alive.

It took a little time to be arrived. The Book itself is very helpful. Although the contents of the Smart Growth is now well known (though some opposition exists), it is well summrized abd clearly presented. Recommendable.

This book is a wonderful handbook for anyone interested in sustainability, regional planning, town planning, urban design and architecture. It is an easy reference for all levels of urbanists from the citizen to the certified planner to the public official. This is an essential manual for students to better understand the basic principles of Smart Growth, New Urbanism and sustainability. Great layout and images, including diagrams, photographs and illustrations.

As a young planner among many other specialties, I find it very difficult to rate the work of my seniors this way. Nonetheless, I believe constructive criticism betters our unified quest to make the world a better place.

First of all, I spent roughly 30 minutes reading this book and not any longer. I bought this book not because I did not know what "smart growth" is, but because I wanted to read the perspectives of my respected seniors. I am however disappointment that the authors could not distinguish between traditional neighborhood development and smart-growth. Essentially, when it was time to define smart-growth, they restated the characteristics of traditional neighborhoods and nothing more - so are we then saying traditional neighborhoods like Georgetown described by the authors in their earlier book, Suburban Nation have smart growth? As planners, we shouldn't just think the use of `new' words and jargons for existing and already defined problems defines any new thing. We are only re-creating more contradiction and confusion.

Today, I hear words like sprawl repair and so on to be gaining momentum; in essence all these `fancy' words are nothing but mere derivatives of urban renewal.

My disappointment is summed up in section 5.10 of the book where the authors write (commenting on Housing Density): "The D word is a contentious issue among planners and citizens. High density is too often seen as a panacea to the ills of sprawl, when in fact it is only one of the many factors contributing to smart growth......." They further postulate Manhattan to be the most sustainable place in America and then contradict themselves by saying that since many people prefer the American Dream of a house on its own yard; municipalities must allow such houses to be built as part of diverse neighborhoods.

My question is what do we consider diverse? I believe the authors mean mixed-zoned neighborhoods. If that were true, then the argument is flawed and short-sighted. Urban sustainability, which really is the crux of smart growth, is beyond land use zoning and compact cities. It includes social health and capital viability of the neighborhoods. In reality, we find many people who work in Manhattan prefer to live in New Jersey cities of Hoboken, Newark and surroundings simply because Manhattan is not sustainable for them. They cannot afford to live there! Whereas there are readily available public transportation systems and so on, they are ridiculously expensive. At the same time, those that are able to live in Manhattan prefer to spend the weekends enjoying the serene ambience of their proper country side homes.

The smart growth manual is useful but not authoritative (to say the least)

If you want an argument for smart growth, or an elaborate explanation of individual issues, this book is not the place to go. But if you just want a short checklist of factors to measure a place or proposed development against, this book is excellent. I also liked the use of photographs to show what the authors were thinking. And despite its brevity, this book is sometimes surprisingly nuanced: rather than completely condemning curvy streets, it draws a distinction between mild curves designed to affect vistas (good) and the utterly disorienting curvilinear streets of late 20th-c. suburbs (bad).

I do think parts of this book are a bit too invested in environmentalist fantasies - for example, the idea that the world is running out of oil, thus requiring a return to a semi-agricultural economy. But even if these fears turn out to be meritless a decade or two from now, 95 percent of this book will still be on target.