Smart Growth Reading List

The High Cost of Free Parking

by Don Schoup 2005 .

Free parking isn’t really free. In fact, the average parking space costs more than the average car. Initially, developers pay for the required parking, but soon tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the cost of parking has diffused throughout the economy. Free parking has other costs: It distorts transportation choices, warps urban form, and degrades the environment.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking, namely, charge fair market prices for curb parking, use the resulting revenue to pay for services in the neighborhoods that generate it, and remove zoning requirements for off-street parking. Such measures, according to the Yale-trained economist and UCLA planning professor, will make parking easier and driving less necessary.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

By Jane Jacobs. 1961. Vintage Books

This book is widely considered to be the original text for Smart Growth ideas, inspiration and principles. Jacobs praised the human scale of successful urban development, the benefits of lively street life throughout the day and evening, and the pedestrian traffic that made for safe, secure-feeling and appealing places. She then warned that all of these great qualities were under attack from modern planning concepts that breakdown the working structure of a city.

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Dark Age Ahead

by Jane Jacobs.2004.Random House

Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten.

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Bowling Alone.

by Robert Putnam. 2001.Touchstone Books

“Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values--these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.”

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Better Together: Restoring the American Community

by Robert Putnam. 2003. Simon and Schuster

The authors stress the importance of participatory involvement, championing networks that create opportunities for people to find their own public voice rather than relying on organizers to speak for them. Thus, one chapter recounts a New Hampshire public arts project in which townspeople’s stories created the structure of an interpretive dance about a local shipyard’s history; another chapter has schoolchildren in Wisconsin writing to local and state leaders to propose public improvements. Though each group is, as one person puts it, "recreating our neighborhood into the kind of village we want it to be," the book emphasizes no particular approach, juxtaposing the work of local governments with neighborhood associations and churchgoers with union organizers. The overarching argument, supported anecdotally rather than statistically, is tentative-something’s going on but it’s too early to tell how big it might become-but Putnam’s reputation will guarantee the book a hearing.

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Sidewalks in the Kingdom.

by Eric Jacobson. 2003.Brazos Press

Like Jane Jacobs, James Howard Kunstler, Ray Oldenburg, and other urban visionaries, Jacobsen sees the city as a hopeful place, where community, tradition, and beauty come together on a human scale--a vision that an eclectic mix of architects, city planners, and sociologists has recently promoted as the New Urbanism. Jacobsen offers a distinctly Christian perspective on this phenomenon, looking to the Bible to develop a theology of the city. He believes that Americans’ love affair with the automobile has undermined the social fabric by offering a false promise of independence while contributing to the impersonal nature of much of American society. He discusses the dangers of urban sprawl, the soul-numbing architecture of the late twentieth century and its devastating effects on communal identity, and the lack of appropriate public space in American cities. Jacobsen has much to say about how we got into the present predicament and what to do to change it, and by resurrecting the notion of the "good" city, he proffers the conception of the city as a spiritual place.

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Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl

by Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie. 1997. Henry Holt & Co.

This book co-authored by the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a former White House speechwriter is a nice mixture of case studies, history lessons and ideas on how cities can build a stronger sense of place. It is full of Smart Growth principles.

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Community By Design: New Urbanism for Suburbs and Small Communities

 by Hall, Porterfield and Porterfield. 2001. McGraw Hill

 

A practical guide to implementing New Urbanism principles in suburbs and small communities that includes case studies that present clear solutions for typical suburban problems including the need for pedestrian access, the lack of parking, the presence of industrial-park eyesores, and the issue of how to create a "sense of place" . Illustrations take architects and planners step-by-step through the design and development process

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Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture hasn’t Worked

By Peter Blake. 1978. Little Brown & Co.

Offers a thorough indictment of modern architecture and calls for less urban planning and demolition, more reconversion, and an end to city zoning.

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