Reviews

Traffic congestion may be different than you think.

Form-based codes let communities set the standard for what new development should look like. They’re transparent and they don’t assume that homes and stores will ruin each other if they’re next door. Will they leave room for creativity and change? It’s hard to see how they could do worse than standard-issue Euclidean zoning has.

More people on the same amount of ground? The Urban Land Institute thinks it can happen here. If ULI is right and if the various policies it describes continue to spread, they’ll make room for architects and urban designers to do more creative work to improve urban life at all levels of density.

Douglas Farr, Chicago architect and a leader in codifying the new LEED standards for neighborhood development, reveals some important trade secrets of green design in Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (2007; John Wiley & Sons; 304 pp.; $75) and calls for a movement comparable to the 1960s moon shot, in which millions of Americans “get” the idea of sustainable design and act on it. “The entire built environment gets renewed or rebuilt every few generations, and we just need to do it differently.” {296} A keeper for reference, even if the movement doesn’t mushroom as fast as he hopes.

Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th- and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl.

We humans don’t do catastrophe well until one hits us, if then. After all, our ancestors didn’t survive by planning a century ahead; they survived by spotting predators fast and stretching one harvest until the next.

The thrust of this book is to reintroduce common sense to the design of neighborhoods