San Antonio College Library

"Challenges current notions of space and distance, helping us learn to appreciate and cultivate proximity. A follow-up to Visualizing Density (2007), this book illustrates 12 North American urban neighborhoods of approximately 125 acres each with hundreds of street-level photographs. Discusses factors of urban form that boost walking and transit use. Visualizes a low-carbon environment in smaller increments and shows how compact development can take...

"Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. This book is a lively critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia - characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots - and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course...

"While the nation's GDP has doubled in the last thirty years, significant increases in family income have been restricted to a small subset of the American population. This disjunct between national economic growth and stagnating incomes in all but the very top tier of the population corresponds with increasing economic inequality and a lack of social and economic mobility. As a consequence, neighborhoods and metropolitian areas have become more polarized....

Today more than eight million Americans live in neighborhoods of extreme economic deprivation, social isolation, and often terrifying violence. The number of ghettos, barrios, and slums in the United States has more than doubled since 1970, and the proportion of the poor who live in them has risen dramatically. Policymakers and the public alike are increasingly concerned about the emergence of an "underclass" population in these blighted neighborhoods....