The Great City Search
Written by Rosie Heywood
Illustrated by David Hancock
Edited by Kamini Khanduri
Usborne Books, EDC Publishing, 1998

Part of Usborne/EDC Publishing’s "Great Search" series, The Great City Search takes readers on an interactive tour of a city.

A new swimming pool is opening in the city, and Mayor Maurice wants you to invite all the important contributors to the pool’s creation to the grand opening celebration. These contributors include Pete the Planner, Asha the Architect, Ellie the Electrician, and several others. To find them, you embark on an adventure to different places in the city, for example, the train station, the school, and the park, to name just a few.

Depicted in colorfully detailed double pages, the places offer a wealth of things to find: activities, landmarks, animals, people, and so forth. After visiting one page, you must "travel" to another page in the book by matching transportation signs. (The signs refer to different means of transportation in the city: the underground train, buses, taxis, and walking.) Along the way, you learn about the essential diversity of a city. For example, the "On the Street" page features a church, a mosque, and a synagogue.

A central lesson of The Great City Search is that many professionals are involved in the creation of a building or site; the city’s new swimming pool required the contributions of ten different specialists. Such collaboration is an essential part of the planning process. You can also visualize the layout of a city. The back of the book includes a map of the city that tells you how to get from one place to another.

The Great City Search follows the Usborne Books philosophy of drawing students in through interactive pages that give them challenges to accomplish. Its engaging format achieves about as much as a book can in giving them a sense of the workings of a city.

* Visit the publisher's website for information about purchasing the book.