Resources for
community design

• Congress for the New Urbanism
• Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio
• FutureHeights
• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler.
• Great Streets by Allan Jacobs.
• The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape by Joel Kotkin.
• The Next American Metropolis by Peter Calthorpe.
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al.
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck.
• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander.
• Visions for a New American Dream: Process, Principles and an Ordinance to Plan and Design Small Communities by Anton Nelessen.

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Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading - the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”
—James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere