Hamdi, Nabeel. Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities. London: Earthscan, 2004.

This book is an argument for the wisdom of the street, the ingenuity of the improvisers, and the long-term, large-scale effectiveness of immediate, small-scale actions. Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it — that is the power of small changes that have huge positive effects. Review at Worldchanging.com, a site dedicated to improving the world by connecting people and information.

Kushner, James A. Post-Automobile City: Legal Mechanisms to Establish the Pedestrian-Friendly City. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press. 2004.

The book describes a vision of a city that is not dominated by the automobile. The post-automobile city is not car-free, but the city is redesigned to offer infrastructure for pedestrians and those who desire to live car-free. Parks, park blocks, gardens, urban landscaped pathways, pedestrian shopping streets, and inviting piazzas would replace the emphasis on surface parking lots and a tight grid of traffic. The book explores various strategies to pursue the post-automobile city, including planning, housing, redevelopment, transportation, and pedestrianization strategies. Kushner also explores various legal mechanisms that can implement the post-automobile city and explains legal constraints to various planning strategies, particularly the constraints of the Takings Clauses and the regime of American property rights. Review in Journal of Land Use, spring 2005 issue.

Barlett, Peggy F. Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

This volume brings together research from anthropology, sociology, public health, psychology, and landscape architecture to highlight how awareness of locale and a meaningful renewal of attachment with the earth are connected to delight in learning about nature as well as to civic action and new forms of community. Community garden coalitions, organic market advocates, and green space preservationists resist the power of global forces, enacting visions of a different future. Their creative efforts tell a story of a constructive and dynamic middle ground between private plots and public action, between human health and ecosystem health, between individual attachment and urban sustainability.

Costello, L. R. Reducing Infrastructure Damage by Tree Roots: A Compendium of Strategies. Cohasset, Cal.: Western Chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture. 2003.

This compendium was developed to serve as a concise and comprehensive reference on the subject of tree and infrastructure conflicts. With up-to-date descriptions and assessments of methods used to reduce damage, this resource is intended to provide tree managers, planners, and engineers with the information they need to create effective management plans.

France, Robert L. Introduction to Watershed Development: Understanding and Managing the Impacts of Sprawl. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Approaches such as "smart growth" or "new urbanism" are often heralded as means to adapt to sprawl. Yet given the serious impacts that development can inflict upon watershed functionality and health, most literature on watershed management has been strangely silent on the topic. This volume presents a framework to measure, minimize, and manage the problem of development from a viewpoint of understanding the responses of watersheds and their inhabitants to this stress.

Bratt, Rachel G., Michael E. Stone, and Chester Hartman. A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

The contributors to A Right to Housing consider the key issues related to America's housing crisis, including income inequality and insecurity, segregation and discrimination, the rights of the elderly, and legislative and judicial responses to homelessness. The book offers a detailed examination of how access to adequate housing is directly related to economic security. With essays by leading activists and scholars, this book presents a powerful and compelling analysis of the persistent inability of the U.S. to meet many of its citizens' housing needs and a comprehensive proposal for progressive change.

"A landmark in progressive housing thought, this book is also a worthy American contribution to the global debate about social and economic rights and the adequacy of market-driven public policy. A must-read for all who care about economic inequality and the ongoing but largely overlooked housing crisis facing low-income people." — Xavier de Souza Briggs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editor of The Geography of Opportunity

Payne, Geoffrey, and Michael Majale. Urban Housing Manual: Making Regulatory Frameworks Work for the Poor. London: Earthscan, 2004.

This handbook tackles the issue of regulatory frameworks (outside the United States) for urban upgrading and new housing development, and how they impact on access to adequate, affordable shelter and other key livelihood assets, in particular for the urban poor. The book illustrates two methods for reviewing regulatory frameworks and expounds guiding principles for effecting change, informed by action research. This practice-oriented manual, which includes a free CD-ROM of case studies, research methods and other reference material, is essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goal 7, Target 11 of significantly improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

Nashville Civic Design Center. The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.

The Plan of Nashville is a community-based vision of how the urban core of Nashville should look and work in the 21st century. The purpose is to help the central city hold its place in civic life. Since Nashville assumed a metropolitan form of government — merging city and county — there have been almost a hundred plans that dealt with some aspect of the center city. The plan was conceived and orchestrated by the Nashville Civic Design Center. As a private not-for-profit, the center listens with independent ears and speaks with an independent voice. Previous plans by Metro government departments and their consultants were constrained by politics and patronage, by available funding or the need to solve specific problems. Another significant difference from previous plans is the area of study. The Plan of Nashville is not an island bound by the noose of the interstate loop. The plan integrates downtown with the areas that frame it via the spoke roads that are the historic entries into downtown. Rather than taking a top down approach, the design center organized the process of listening to the community. More than 400 citizens attended a series of workshops in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods to express their opinions and draw their dreams. Further information may be found at www.planofnashville.com.

Friend, John, and Allen Hickling. Planning under Pressure: the Strategic Choice Approach. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005.

Offers managers, planners, consultants and students a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the Strategic Choice Approach, which has gradually been attracting worldwide recognition as a fresh, versatile and practical approach to collaborative decision making under uncertainty. Starting from basic principles, the book uses helpful diagrams and clear explanations to demonstrate practical ways of approaching daunting decision problems; of devising possible ways forward; and of working effectively towards agreed courses of action. Endorsed by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez!

Belleville, Bill. Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate my Cracker Landscape. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2006.

The poignant chronicle of award-winning nature writer Bill Belleville and how he came to understand and love his historic Cracker farmhouse and "relic" neighborhood in central Florida, even as it was all wiped out from under him. His narrative is eloquent, informed, and impassioned, a saga in which tractors and backhoes trample through the woods next to his home in order to build the backbone of Florida sprawl--the mall. In Florida, one of the nation's fastest growing states (and where local and state governments encourage growth), balancing use with preservation is an uphill battle. Sprawl spreads into the countryside, consuming not just natural lands but Old Florida neighborhoods and their unique history.

Pierson, Melissa Holbrook. The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Has the future — ever more people with their houses, stores, roads, and sprawl — been wrecking your past? Melissa Holbrook Pierson, with unalloyed insight, elucidates how it feels to lose that landscape of home. In the past 20 years, like countless towns it resembles, Akron, Ohio, has lost its singularity, and much of what native-daughter Pierson loves about it. She then moves to Hoboken, New Jersey, a forgotten appendage of New York — until stockbrokers discover it. Finally, she speaks of rural areas, telling of the thousands of upstate New Yorkers displaced by city reservoirs. New York Times review, January 15, 2006.

Freeman, Lance. There goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

The author interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods. He describes the theoretical and planning policy implications of his findings, both for New York City and for any gentrifying urban area.
NPR interview, July 10, 2006.

Fullilove, Mindy Thompson. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do about It. New York: Ballantine, 2005.

They called it progress. But for the people whose homes and districts were bulldozed, the urban renewal projects that swept America starting in 1949 were nothing short of assault. Vibrant city blocks — places rich in history — were reduced to garbage-strewn vacant lots. When a neighborhood is destroyed its inhabitants suffer "root shock": a traumatic stress reaction related to the destruction of one's emotional ecosystem. The ripple effects of root shock have an impact on entire communities that can last for decades. Mindy Fullilove examines root shock through the story of urban renewal and its effect on the African American community. Between 1949 and 1973, urban renewal, spearheaded by business and real estate interests, destroyed 1,600 African American neighborhoods in cities across the United States. But urban renewal didn't disrupt only the black community. The anger it caused led to riots that sent whites fleeing for the suburbs, stripping them of their own sense of place. And it left big gashes in the centers of U.S. cities that are only now slowly being repaired.

Hoffer, Peter Charles. Seven Fires: The Urban Infernos that Reshaped America. New York: Public Affairs, 2006.

This resonant and fascinating book by a renowned historian examines how seven fires shaped the larger course of American history. The Boston fire of 1760 set the stage for the American Revolution. The Pittsburgh fire of 1845 opened the way to larger scale industrial plants. Out of the ashes of the Chicago fire of 1871 came the modern skyscraper, the Haymarket Riots, and the Pullman Strike. The Baltimore fire of 1904 showed how a city's downtown, utterly destroyed, could re-invent itself after a catastrophe. The Detroit fire of 1967 forced politicians to concede what people of Detroit already knew — that racism and racially based deprivation were not changed by the civil rights movement. The Oakland Hills tragedy demolished a landscape of private privilege and imperiled the dream of leisure living in natural settings. Apart from their domestic and global political implications, the fires of 9/11 have prodded a complacent nation to admit to itself that 21st century emergency services, and the urban lifestyles they protected, have to be thoroughly rethought.

Renewing, Rebuilding, Remembering. New York: Van Alen Institute, [2002].

"Renewing, Rebuilding, Remembering" was initiated in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Exploring how seven cities (Beirut, Berlin, Kobe, Manchester, Oklahoma City, Sarajevo and San Francisco) have renewed their urban life after catastrophic disasters, the exhibition places the events of 9/11 within a global historical and cultural context and demonstrates that there is not only room but also a necessity for creative solutions to building cities.