Brief Notes on Two Recent Books

I recently read two interesting books that may be of interest to members.

One is entitled, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities, written by Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph and published in 1997 by McGraw-Hill. Southworth is Chair of the Planning Department at University of California at Berkeley. Ben-Joseph teaches planning and landscape architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The brief 184 page book traces the history of standards for streets in the U.S., focusing particularly on the institutionalization of street standards after the Great Depression and the acceptance of the suburban norm for street widths and layouts. The book then discusses neo-traditional concept and summarizes the research, such as it is, on the impact of neo-traditional design on travel patterns, auto usage, safety, etc.

The second interesting book is called The Compact City, a Sustainable Urban Form? This is an English book published in 1996 and edited by Jenks, Burton and Williams of Oxford University. As of the time the book was put together, Britain had adopted a policy calling for compact urban communities. The book contains a series of essays and summaries of research on the physical, social and economic dimensions of the compact community ideal. This is clearly not a polemic on one side or the other of compact vs. disbursed land use patterns. However, many of the claims and arguments made in support of compact patterns do not survive the critical analysis found in many of the chapters. The book can perhaps be dismissed since it deals entirely with England, Europe and Australia. However, many of the findings probably hold true for the U.S. The book is published by E & FN Spon.