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The Smart Growth Manual |  | Authors: Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, Mike Lydon
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $15.34
as of 9/7/2010 20:44 CDT details
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New (19) Used (11) from $14.08
Seller: sbd-
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 14225
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0071376755
Dewey Decimal Number: 307.12160973
UPC: 639785328872
EAN: 9780071376754
ASIN: 0071376755
Publication Date: October 15, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Everyone is calling for smart growth...but what exactly is it? In The Smart Growth Manual, two leading city planners provide a thorough answer. From the expanse of the metropolis to the detail of the window box, they address the pressing challenges of urban development with easy-to-follow advice and broad array of best practices.
With their landmark book Suburban Nation, Andres Duany and Jeff Speck "set forth more clearly than anyone has done in our time the elements of good town planning" (The New Yorker). With this long-awaited companion volume, the authors have organized the latest contributions of new urbanism, green design, and healthy communities into a comprehensive handbook, fully illustrated with the built work of the nation's leading practitioners.
"The Smart Growth Manual is an indispensable guide to city planning. This kind of progressive development is the only way to fully restore our economic strength and create new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete in the first rank of world economies." -- Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco
"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). I highly recommend [it] as a part of any community participant’s or urban planner’s desktop references." -- LocalPlan.org
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 Great resource, very accessible and easy to read handbook. July 27, 2010
Jason R. Dunham (Tampa, FL United States)
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.
Good for what it is June 30, 2010
Michael Lewyn (Jacksonville, FL)
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.
Supremely useful--with a few suggestions for the next edition April 16, 2010
Reader in St Pete (Florida, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Growth is NOT inevitable April 15, 2010
Mary Raine (timetoread)
0 out of 14 found this review helpful
The first sentence of this book reads "Growth is Inevitable." Read Better not Bigger, by Eben Fodor, which WITH data clearly explains that growth is NOT inevitable. Many nationwide studies say the same. The inevitability of growth is what the growth industry would like us to believe, even with a declining population and a dwindling amount of land. This is a big industry (engineers, contractors, builders, realtors, architects, land use lawyers, surveyors, masons, landscapers and they ALL need us to believe as does this book that growth is inevitable. The new coinage "Smart Growth" is not always so smart. Time to improve what we have, use existing architecture, live in smaller homes and even share our homes as we become empty nesters. The other myth is that growth reduces our taxes. Anybody's taxes going down? When will we and "they" wake up and smell the coffee. As much fun as it has been we can't grow forever. The earth is only so big and air, land and water are not limitless. Like with the economic turndown, we are going to face that we may not have us much in the future. If we build on every parcel of land we won't have any left for recreation and trees are what absorb all the poisons and give us oxygen. Hmmmm, if I have a choice between a five bedroom house or breathing??? Let me think.
 Laudable Intentions! February 4, 2010
Pierre Gauthier (Montréal)
7 out of 14 found this review helpful
This book's laudable objective is to present, very specifically, how smart growth can actually be implemented. A considerable number of elements are presented, some very detailed, in fact similar to building standards, others very general that would be difficult to apply as such. The book is structured in four sections: regions, neighbourhoods, streets and buildings. Strangely for a work with a pro-urban standpoint, downtowns are not treated as such, although passing references are made here and there.
Odd editorial choices were made with respect to the book's production. First, doubtlessly to project a green image, the fibre-packed paper used is very obviously recycled _ as was current when recycling first was introduced decades ago. This leads to a very poor printing quality of the colour photographs _ which are perhaps not all that artistic and telling in the first place. Second, the book is pocket-size, presumably so that it can be easily carried to meetings. This of course restricts importantly the space available for text. As each item is covered on a single page and each is illustrated with a photograph, needless to say that content is not very elaborate. Third, pages are not numbered, most likely to avoid confusion with the hierarchy of the items presented (1.1, 1.2, etc.). This actually makes consulting the book a bit confusing as these section numbers are not written on the right-hand page corners.
At the end of the book, several pages are devoted to listing the addresses of various local groups devoted to the promotion of smart growth in the United States. This list, of course, is liable to being quickly outdated. So, why not refer to a single Web site?
Actually, why not replace the whole book with a Web site where references to other sources could be liberally provided? With BlackBerries and iPhones, its portability would not be reduced and it could constantly be improved and updated.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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