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Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
Jeff Speck · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorSuburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck · 320 pages
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
James Howard Kunstler · 318 pages
In Home from Nowhere Kunstler explores the growing movement across America to restore the physical dwelling place of our civilization. Picking up where The Geography of Nowhere left off, Kunstler describes precisely how the American Dream of a little cottage in a natural landscape mutated into today's sprawling automobile suburb in all its ghastliness, and why "we are going to run shrieking from
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change
Victor Papanek · 339 pages
Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
Cameron Sinclair · 333 pages
"Edited by architecture for Humanity, a volunteer-based organization that provides architectural solutions to humanitarian crises, Design Like You Give a Damm brings the best of humanitarian design to the printed page. Proceeds from the sale of this book will support the work of Architecture for Humanity." --Cover.
Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan
Alex Kerr · 432 pages
"In an ancient tale, a Chinese emperor asks his court painter about the easiest and most difficult subjects to paint. The painter replies, "Dogs are difficult, demons are easy." To Alex Kerr, a longtime resident expert and observer, Japan's "dogs" are the vital activities that sustain an ecologically and culturally responsible economy, while the expedient "demons" are the million-dollar boondoggle
Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer · 341 pages
After spending much of his life shifting between various omnivore and herbivore eating habits, the author presents a thought provoking look at why and how humans choose their diets. Delivering the pros and cons of eating meat, he invites readers on an insightful exploration into the many facets of food. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work,
Ways of Seeing
John Berger · 166 pages
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we e
The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America
Mark Sundeen · 330 pages
The Unsettlers describes the search for the simple life through stories of diverse Americans living off the grid.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
Christopher W. Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel · 1,171 pages
Alexander and his co-authors present us with over two hundred (roughly 250) "patterns" that they believe must be present in order for an environment to be pleasing, comfortable, or in their words, "alive." The patterns start at the most general level -- the first pattern, "Independent Regions," describes the ideal political entity, while another of my favorite patterns, "Mosaic of Subcultures," de
What are People for?: Essays
Wendell Berry · 210 pages
Essays on Nate Shaw, Harry Caudill, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, diversity, waste, eating, local culture, consumption, conservation, environmental concerns, and other topics.
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late
Thom Hartmann · 336 pages
"While everything appears to be collapsing around us - ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, the end of cheap oil, water shortages, global famine, wars - we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children's children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio's web movie Global Warning, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happeni
The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture
Fritjof Capra · 464 pages
Cities for People
Jan Gehl · 269 pages
Synopsis: For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use-or could use-the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable c
On Photography
Susan Sontag · 207 pages
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis · 462 pages
Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
Elizabeth L. Cline · 258 pages
Evaluates the costs of low-priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing.
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
Simon Schama · 698 pages
This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond · 592 pages
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G
Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
Peter Geoffrey Hall · 632 pages
"Peter Hall's seminal Cities of Tomorrow remains an unrivalled account of the history of planning in theory and practice, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it. Now comprehensively revised, the fourth edition offers a perceptive, critical, and global history of urban planning and design throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. A revised and updat
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
Caroline Fraser · 480 pages
Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
Taras Grescoe
"Taras Grescoe rides the rails all over the world and makes an elegant and impassioned case for the imminent end of car culture and the coming transportation revolution"I am proud to call myself a straphanger," writes Taras Grescoe. The perception of public transportation in America is often unflattering--a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford i
Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo
Margot Mifflin · 160 pages
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson · 560 pages
"As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business – eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavouring to be amused – and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mo