San Antonio College Library

Urban planning is vital in helping communities take stock of what's good and bad about the community in the present and determining the best improvements to make for the future. Here is a practical overview of this fascinating field.

"From the same team that produced the monumental five-volume architectural history of New York comes the definitive work on the development of the garden suburb, a phenomenon that first emerged in England in the 1830s and still dominates residential architecture today"-- Paradise Planned is the definitive history of the development of the garden suburb, a phenomenon that originated in England in the late eighteenth century, was quickly adopted in...

"More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where...

"On computer printouts, this brainchild of a faculty couple, he a land-use expert and she a geographer, sounds intellectually inspired but of course impractical, a pipe dream; yet when the calmly audacious plan of Frank and Deborah Popper to return millions of devastated acres in ten Plains states to their natural condition and to the buffalo was described in an article by Anne Matthews in the New York Times Magazine in the summer of 1990, the reaction...

For the past three decades, the federal government has targeted the poorest areas of American cities with a succession of antipoverty initiatives, yet these urban neighborhoods continue to decline. According to David Rusk, focusing on programs aimed at improving inner-city neighborhoods - playing the "inside game"--Is a losing strategy. Achieving real improvement requires matching the "inside game" with a strong "outside game" of regional strategies...

In many areas of the world, environmental degradation in and around human settlements is undermining prospects for both socioeconomic justice and ecological sustainability. To explore the issues involved in this worldwide problem, Keith Pezzoli focuses on a dramatic instance of conflict that grew out of the unauthorized penetration of human settlements into the Ajusco greenbelt zone, a vital part of Mexico City's ecological reserve. The Mexican government's...