Community By Design: New Urbanism for Suburbs and Small Communities

If you can get it for a few bucks, or check it out of a library, it might be worth it. It felt a little obvious and textbooky to me. Charter for the New Urbanism would be a better purchase.

ok

I was originally unattracted to the book due to what I knew of 'new urbanism' and its leftist- I dare say socialist- doctrines. But I was mistaken; this book does not advocate packing people into small space for the sake of 'saving nature' and eliminating 'urban sprawl.' Rather, it is a pragmatic approach to building beautiful communities.This book is richly illustrated with diagrams and photos that show how a land developer can create a sense of place. I specifically enjoyed how to design road systems to achieve different feelings within a subdivision. It is detailed and yet not overly so that the reader would become bogged down in technicalities. It is absolutely superb.

book came fast and in great condition, just in time for when I needed to start reading it. no highlights, torn pages and barely any signs of use.

This is an excellent introduction to how the philosophy of New Urbanism can be applied to suburbs. It would be very helpful to people serving on Zoning & Planning Commissions or City Councils.

I bought this book to assist in my subdivision design work. I find it to be comprehensive and applicable to practical situations. The book covers pertinent areas of community design that is not easily understood when reading other text.

Enjoyed it!

The suburban landscape of the United States is the subject of this book, advertised as "the first practical guide to creating communities that truly are communities-not merely enclaves near off-ramps." Guided by the principles of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), the book uses excerpts from that organization's Charter to illuminate its advocacy of more connected development patterns. The book's scope extends beyond the commercial strip to include the major building blocks of towns and suburbs, such as apartment complexes, schools, parks and office campuses.Hall and Porterfield includes passages of fist-thumping suburbia-bashing similar to James Howard Kunstler's Home From Nowhere (1998, Touchstone Books) or Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation (1997, Crown). They also include graphic material, much of it adapted their earlier book, A Concise Guide to Community Planning (1994, McGraw-Hill).Readers knowledgeable about New Urbanism will find few surprises here, other than a few glaring factual errors, like a reference to "Tyson's Corners, Virginia, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States" (p. 7) and a claim that Edge Cities and urban villages are "two names for essentially the same thing" (p. 210). Good points crop up here and there, but recommendations are so limited in scope that it can be difficult to discern whether the sample site designs are intended to be good or bad examples, which limits the book's usefulness pedagogically. The lack of dimensions on most of the drawings also severely limits the book's utility as a practical reference. Hall and Porterfield contrast "conventional suburban development" and "Traditional Neighborhood Development" options for site plans, but the comparisons sometimes seem forced and nearly always ignore the larger regional issues so critical to the debate.One ideal audience for this book might suburban planning commissioners, who need guidance from designers in order to understand the differences between conventional suburban development pods and walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods.