Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco Review

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Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco ReviewOUR BETTER NATURE: ENVIRONMENT AND THE MAKING OF SAN FRANCISCO is a key acquisition for any California collection, especially those with Bay Area facts and history. It covers the history of the city with a focus on land management and urban growth, considering how San Franciscans remade the landscape. Chapters survey how nature in the City was 'managed' and are key to understanding the City's growth and choices.
Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco OverviewFew cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco--the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both. Dreyfus examines the ways that San Franciscans remade the landscape to fit their needs, and how their actions reflected and affected their ideas about nature, from the destruction of wetlands and forests to the creation of Golden Gate and Yosemite parks, the Sierra Club, and later, the birth of the modern environmental movement. Today, many San Franciscans seek to strengthen the ties between cities and nature by pursuing more sustainable and ecologically responsible ways of life. Consistent with that urge, Our Better Nature not only explores San Francisco's past but also poses critical questions about its future. Dreyfus asks us to reassess our connection to the environment and to find ways to redefine ourselves and our cities within nature. Only with such an attitude will San Francisco retain the magic that has charmed residents and visitors alike since before recorded history.

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New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward Review

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New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward ReviewDr. Gruen has provided a very readable presentation of fundamental economic theory and then exposed in practical terms how some of the value judgements underpinning various planning, zoning & financial regulatory policies have, over time, worked to produce a variety of unintended but predictable consequenes in residential and commercial real estate markets.
Whether analyst, developer or member of a policy-making authority, this is a thought provoking must read. I am greatful for the contribution.New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward OverviewThe recent recession is one result of how local planning laws and practices have stifled competition, discouraged innovation, and artificially pushed up prices in America's most economically vibrant regions. Economist and consultant Claude Gruen unravels the story behind how these unintended consequences have resulted from the evolution of local zoning, growth controls, and laws intended to increase housing affordability.New Urban Development traces how locally induced housing cost increases led federal policy-makers to toss out the safeguards against lending excesses that had been put in place during the 1930s. But the story begins much earlier, during the colonial era, continuing up through the mortgage collapse that ushered in the recession of 2008. In his sweeping history of these issues, Gruen considers gentrification, environmentalism, sprawl, anti-sprawl movements, and more. His clarification of how urban development change occurs backs up his recommendations for increasing the production of housing and replacing obsolete commercial and industrial spaces with development that serves the twenty-first-century economy. New Urban Development specifies thirteen changes to policies at the federal, state, and local levels to provide better and less expensive urban housing, desirable neighborhoods, and thriving workplaces across the country.

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Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century Review

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Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century ReviewI enjoyed reading this book, as it gives a different perspective on urban transportation systems here in the United States. Solutions to many of the mobility issues facing US cities today, especially road congestion, are presented. The solutions preferred by the authors are very aggressive and non-traditional. Reading this book has strengthened my view that solutions to our transportation issues are an important piece to keeping the United States economy strong globally.
I found the chapter on New York City to be especially interesting. It broadened my perspective on the relationship between different modes of transportation in our nation's largest and most complex city.Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century OverviewTraffic congestion is a growing problem and unless policy makers and transportation officials make some dramatic changes, it will rise to unacceptable levels by 2030. In

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Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape Review

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Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape ReviewSong Of The City: An Intimate History Of The American Urban Landscape by Philadelphia planner and activist Nathaniel Popkin, is a highly recommended, anecdotal history of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the second half of the twentieth century. Using varied stories drawn from the lives of individual people to accurately reflect and bring to life this urban American community during its years of late 20th Century evolution, Song Of The City embodies the quintessential human experience which, taken as a whole, comprise the "soul" of the city.Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape OverviewDuring the last quarter of the 20th century, many American cities were in a state of decline. The automobile paved the way for suburban sprawl and white flight, leaving cities with crumbling infrastructures and high crime rates. A growing collective interest in saving cities, however, has begun to turn the tide. In this poetic love song to the American city, Nathaniel Popkin helps readers see the city as a dynamic being with an unmistakable life cycle. Using anecdotes about the neighborhoods and residents of one city, Philadelphia, the author examines the ways that people have inherited, adapted to, and altered the living city.

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Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design) Review

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Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design) ReviewHaving embarked on a sustainability plan without the aid or foresight of any type of guidebook or comprehensive strategy, I am extremely supportive of the effort that author Stephen Coyle has undertaken in compiling Sustainable and Resilient Communities. This book should be the "Read Me!" document for anyone looking to engage in sustainability planning efforts from a government or community perspective. It's not the first book that I've read on how to engage in sustainability efforts (honestly such titles are beginning to become "a dime a dozen"), but it is the first book that focuses on how to create an action plan to make a community more sustainable (rather than simply focusing on successful efforts in other areas). Coyle manages to provide realistic strategies that can easily be worked into the political context of almost any community without crossing into the fringe of developing technologies or antiquated reductionist themes.
Sustainable and Resilient Communities is broken down into 13 chapters which address the various facets of sustainability. The chapters are:
1.The Built Environments and Its Supporting Systems
2.The Process of Transformation
3.The Physical Built Environment
4.The Regulatory Environment
5.Transportation
6.Energy
7.Water
8.Natural Environment
9.Food Production/Agriculture
10.Solid Waste
11.Economics
12.Engagement and Education
13.Public Health
The first two chapters provide a solid assessment of the sustainability planning process and offer a prescriptive framework for how it can be implemented within a community. Chapter 2 also provides a robust breakdown of the process showing how to assemble potential stakeholders, how to effectively use those stakeholders, how to gain support from a broad segment of the community, and how to successfully implement a sustainability plan. The remaining chapters break down each of the specialty topics and provide case studies that demonstrate how the topics were successfully tackled.
Sustainable and Resilient Communities is a 404 page manual on how to create a sustainability plan. This is the manual that you should pass around your organization or civic group to learn how to manage the process and how to build support. I found it to be well-written and filled with a wealth of information. Coyle has done a superb job of assembling a group of experts well-versed in the subject matter presented.It doesn't take a singular or rigid approach to building a sustainability plan but instead shows how communities can create objectives that meet the needs of their citizens.
I found the book to be well illustrated with rational and relevant examples. The graphics and detailed examples from municipalities around the country are extremely useful in brainstorming approaches. The graphics are also appropriately placed to make the topics at hand more cogent. The book opens with a Foreword from Andrés Duany and continues with poignant articles by renowned experts in their respective fields.
If you're interested in sustainability plans or sustainability action plans or just creating sustainability indicators for your organization this book is an excellent place to start. It's targeted to those involved with government organization, but it's a good tool in the hands of a community activists or civic group. It would also be an excellent manual for organizations looking to approach sustainability internally.
Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design) Overview
The ultimate step-by-step action plan guidebook for making communities resilient, resourceful, and healthy

Many of today's communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-being in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies, rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient. Sustainable and Resilient Communities delineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems-transportation, energy, water, natural environment, food production, solid waste, and economics-through:

Methods for assessing a community's key sustainability quotient

Deploying tools for establishing timely performance goals and metrics

Developing strategies for evaluating, selecting, and implementing 'high-leverage' interventions

Activating policies, codes, programs, plans, and practices, as well as monitoring and upgrading their performance

The book includes a range of targeted case studies, from New Orleans and South Carolina to Arizona and California, illustrating geographically diverse approaches for urban contexts large and small.
A resource for developing an ecological urbanism, Sustainable and Resilient Communities employs time-proven, broadly applicable strategies and actions that can be customized for specific environmental, energy, and economic conditions.

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