Planning the Good Community: New Urbanisms in Theory and Practice:

Planning the Good Community: New Urbanisms in Theory and Practice

Product Description

People either love new urbanism or hate it. Some find compact new neighborhoods of brownstone row houses, elegant Victorian mansions, or country cottages delightful: places that celebrate the city and its history, and offer hope for a sustainable future. Others see these ‘urban villages’ as up-graded suburbs mired in the aesthetics of another time and place: cloyingly nostalgic anachronisms for affluent elites. This book examines new urban approaches both in theory and practice. Taking a critical look at how new urbanism lives up to its theory in its practice, it asks whether new urban approaches offer a viable path to the good community.

With examples drawn principally from the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, and Japan, this book explores new urban approaches in a wide range of settings. It considers the relationship between the movement for urban villages and an urban renaissance that has spread in the UK and Europe with the ‘New Urbanism’ movement in the United States and Canada and asks whether the concerns that drive contemporary planning theory – issues like power, democracy, spatial patterns, and globalization – receive adequate attention in new urban approaches. Does new urbanism offer a persuasive normative theory of urban development that will shape planning practice for years to come, or a design paradigm that cannot transcend its cultural origins in a particular time and place?

The work of new urbanists has resulted in beautiful urban districts that reveal the potential of planning to create more attractive and meaningful urban landscapes. New urbanists have developed and propagated a formula for planning the good community, and have gained international attention in the process. Beauty is arguably a necessary condition for the good community, but is it sufficient?

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Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World:

Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World

FOREWORD BY ERIK SPIEKERMANN

How did design help choose a president?
Why are people buying houses they cannot afford?
Why do U.S. car makers now struggle to compete? Why do we really have an environmental crisis?
Design matters. Like never before.

Disarming the weapons of mass deception.
Designers create so much of what we see, what we use, and what we experience. In this time of unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises, designers can choose what their young profession will be about: inventing deceptions that encourage more consumption—or helping repair the world.

Do Good Design is a call to action:
It alerts designers to the role they play in persuading global audiences to fulfill invented needs. The book outlines a more sustainable approach to both the practice and the consumption of design. All professionals will be inspired by the message of how one industry can feel better about itself by holding onto its principles. In this provocative and dramatically-illustrated book, David Berman offers a powerful and hopeful message for all designers.

Today, everyone is a designer.
And the future of civilization is our common design project.

Do Good Design is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit’s New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA. The author will make a donation of 10% of his proceeds to a not for-profit organization whose mission is in alignment with the goals of this book.

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