The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream

Cover, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream Author(s): Peter Calthorpe

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

ISBN: 1878271687

Order From: Amazon.com
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Paperback, 175 pages
Publication date: June 1993

Art and Architecture Editor’s Recommended Book, 04/01/97:
One of the foremost practitioners of New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, an urban designer and architect based in Berkeley, California, offers one of the most coherent and persuasive arguments for moving the United States away from sprawl and toward more compact, mixed-use, economically diverse, and ecologically sound communities. This book presents 24 of Calthorpe’s regional urban plans, in which towns are organized so that residents can be less dependent upon their cars and can walk, bike, or take public transportation between work, school, home, and shopping. This book is not just for architects and urban planners, but for all concerned citizens interested in developing a cohesive, feasible vision of the sustainable city of the future.

Booknews, Inc. , 02/01/94:
Advocates a fundamental change in patterns of building to respond to the growth crisis in US metropolitan regions. Defines a new direction, and provides guidelines–not an architectural manifesto or utopian proposal, but the alternatives currently shaping debate regarding housing, traffic, and environmental and social problems. Describes numerous real projects from various regions. Abundantly illustrated. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The publisher , 06/28/96:
California-based architect and planner Peter Calthorpe has moved beyond suburb bashing and published an intelligent, coherent vision of humane, walkable, ecologically sound cities that could shape American development into the 21st century. The Next American Metropolis is equal parts polemic, practical how-to guidelines, and personal portfolio.–Robert Gerloff, Utne Reader Passionate and practical, holistic and plain speaking, as good a summary of the many problematic and interwoven dimensions of sprawl as has recently appeared….The polemic flirts with, but stops short of, apocalyptic projection, reverting instead to common sense persuasiveness…. [Calthorpe has] led a courageous, lonely insurgency against the sheer banality of much contemporary suburban planning.–Alex Krieger, International Contract