From the Daily Scot:
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Here is another book that I believe belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves the built environment.
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Authors: Julie Campoli. Published in 2012 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
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Made For Walking highlights the urban design elements that comprise some of North America’s most pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods . The author starts by describing our current situation of sprawl across much of the continent in the “Everything is Somewhere Else” chapter. We quickly jump from the depressing outcome of Motordom to great potential by learning about the Five D’s and a P and all aspects of neighbourhood form brilliantly communicated with figure-ground diagrams, maps and entire street elevations.
The highlight is the Twelve Places Made for Walking chapter, providing case studies of great communities from LoDo in Denver to Flamingo Park in Miami Beach. In addition Miss Campoli also takes readers for a tour around our very own Kitsilano. I highly recommend Made for Walking if you want to enhance your city-building toolkit, learning about great low-carbon neighbourhoods in our own backyard.
A most interesting and timely publication. I certainly hope it doesn’t resort to paint by numbers formulae (Seven Steps ….) but examines the interconnectivity between neighbourhoods, jobs and homes. You can have all the walkable streets in the world but they don’t mean much when you still have to commute long distances to work / school and back.
Perhaps the question should be: How do we REBUILD our cities to address the issues of our time, including climate change and affordability?
MB – The author connects those dots too.
Ken Greenberg is another urbanist (with an architecture background) who wrote a book on walkable communities. “Walking Home” spans four decades of his experience in NYC, the Netherlands, and now Toronto. What I like about his work is that he has a very unique balance between his decades in the public sector and his more recent years as a private consultant. He has worked both sides of the counter in several great cities.