The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (Hardcover)

by Peter Katz (Author) "Only 10 years old and occupying a mere 80 acres (approximately that of an average-sized regional shopping mall), the coastal town of Seaside on Florida's..." (more)
Key Phrases: regulating plan, urban code, urban infill, Los Angeles, Laguna West, Playa Vista (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
The New Urbanism is a movement that seeks to restore a civil realm to urban planning and a sense of place to our communities. It is a tangible response to the failed Modernist planning that has resulted in unchecked suburban sprawl, slavish dependence on the automobile, and the abandonment and decay of our cities. Katz, who heads a marketing and design firm, brings together in this informative and accessible book the voices and case studies of the young architects and planners who practice the New Urbanism--Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, among them. They gear their designs to the scale of the pedestrian and seek to promote a symbiotic relationship between urban development and public transportation. An often published example of this movement is the community of Seaside, Florida. Extensively illustrated with plans, diagrams, and color photographs and renderings, this highly instructive book is a must for architecture and urban planning collections, and suitable for general readers.
- Thomas P.R. Nugent, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
``. . .informative and accessible. . .the highly instructive book is a must for architecture and urban planning collections, and suitable for the general reader.'' (Library Journal )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional; 1 edition (October 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070338892
• ISBN-13: 978-0070338890
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 8.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #153,063 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Milestone book quickly becoming coffee-table classic, September 17, 1998

By A Customer

In the first half of the 1990s, this book culminated the beginning of the most influential postwar stream of thought about American cities and city life, New Urbanism. It was intended to be the coffee-table conversation starter for suburban yups feeling just uncomfortable enough with their time-stressed lives to admit that, yes, their street is bleak, their house a cartoon, their strip-malled "planned community" a joke.

By starting the national conversation, the book has succeeded spectacularly, and continues to serve the purpose. With solid, workmanlike graphic design, it shows the way forward by depicting and decoding a handful of places both designed and built as successful alternatives to suburban sprawl.

Behind the scenes, the book became the flagpole around which a genuinely new intellectual movement rallied. At the time of publication, several of these projects were just on the drawing board. Today, only a few years later, over 150 such projects are blooming nationwide. New Urbanism today is the organizing question in the serious architecture and planning schools, in the development community, and in land-use "smart growth" politics. Developers are either running scared of it, or ripping it off, or putting big money into it. New Urbanism is a powerful set of ideas, and you can find them all here. This is the book that focused the disparate efforts of a score of highly talented, individualistic practitioners into a coherent beam. This is the book with the irrefutable visual argument in favor of building good places to live.

It is good, then, that the book's examples have been outrun. The book appears now almost quaint to those who, on the front lines of the land-use wars, have internalized New Urbanism's basic principles. The book is silent on, for example, the practical, tough, messy, political imperatives needed to reverse a half-century of mad sprawl. Reading "The New Urbanism", one would conclude that healthy places to live are bestowed as if by magic from the brow of one or another luminary planner. A second edition, incorporating successes and lessons learned, will be needed soon. The Playa Vista example in particular appears likely to vanish embarrassingly from the drawing board into the thin air where good ideas go.

However, the basic visual argument remains solid, almost timeless. I use the book constantly to introduce new allies to the cause and to silence critics. I recommend it to anybody interested in America's lousy excuses for cities, which are, after all, our civilization itself.

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Urbanism: This is how/where I want to live, December 11, 1998

By A Customer

The basic principles presented in this book are the stuff that dreams are made of. I have shared the ideas presented in this book with many of my friends and they all want to live in communities such as this. We've been strip-malled, mega-malled and automobilized to near-death. New Urbanism as presented here is like a million breaths of fresh air.

It is best to read the basic principles presented in the front of the book first. It may look like dry reading at first but as you get into it, your interest will be piqued at first, then grabbed, and you won't want to put it down till you've read it all. Having read this part you will be armed with the knowledge that, to date, no development or developer has had the guts to follow the principles completely. All of the projects presented include some elements of New Urbanism but none of them have it right. One of the other customer reviewers of this book, Ken Wing, missed this entirely. Hey Ken, there is no people in the Seaside pictures because they want the reader to see the architecture! Those who don't get it, or are afraid of change, tend to trivialze New Urbanism and mis-represent it.

Once you have read this book, you, like myself will want to immediately pack up and move to a New Urbanist community. Better ones are coming out of the ground each year and I hope to see one near me real soon.

27 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every library in the country should have this book!, August 12, 1999

By	Jeff C. Goolsby (Brevard, North Carolina (land of waterfalls)) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have only had the book a day and already it has given me great pleasure and joy. I love the fantastic pictures and diagrams. The computer digitalizations on a few existing towns today and what they could be like were truely fasinating. I couldn't help not liking the indepth descriptions of numourous cities, towns, and villages from around the country and canada as well. This book had colorful photos and diagrams, this book to me is pure genus!