Fantastic book!

It is an absolute must-read for anyone who has even the slightest interest in city planning, urbanism, American history, community building, geography, or what makes a place truly worth living.

Suburban Nation is a scathing indictment of American sprawl and the terrible planning that has accompanied it. It vividly explains how the suburbs came into being and directly cause or exacerbate many of the gravest problems of our era, such as physical and mental health issues, racism, income inequality, and environmental degradation. However, it's not all doom and gloom. The authors frequently reference cities, both new and old, that are actively pushing back against sprawl, employing both traditional and innovative methods. The book also presents numerous ways to effect change, whether you're a city planner, a policy maker, or a concerned citizen.

Since this book was written in 2000, it's likely that a significant portion of the statistics and information is now out of date. Nevertheless, the core values and themes of this book remain as true as ever. The supplementary pictures were truly helpful in further elucidating some of the concepts. I only wish there had been more of them to enhance the understanding even further.

If you've never given much thought to the physical structure of our suburbs and regions, this is an excellent place to begin.

Suburbs and regions have a unique layout and design that can have a significant impact on our daily lives.

The way streets are arranged, the location of parks and green spaces, and the proximity of schools, shops, and other amenities all play a role in shaping our communities.

By taking a closer look at the physical structure of these areas, we can gain a better understanding of how they function and how we can improve them.

We can identify areas that are in need of renovation or redevelopment, and we can work to create more sustainable and livable communities.

Whether you're a city planner, a developer, or simply a concerned citizen, exploring the physical structure of our suburbs and regions is an important step towards building a better future.

As a lay person, I found the exploration of what constitutes a real community and neighborhood, as well as its inverse, to be truly thought-provoking.

However, there were certain aspects that were a bit too technical for my understanding. Additionally, I would have greatly appreciated more pictures to enhance the visual understanding of the concepts.

Nonetheless, I can clearly envision the usefulness of this for the township official as it provides a solid foundation for considering land use.

Moreover, I would have liked to see more examples of towns, whether historic or new, that have successfully implemented these principles.

For instance, while I understand that Kentlands is often compared to Disneyland, it would be interesting to explore other towns that have achieved a harmonious balance between community, neighborhood, and land use in different ways.

This would offer a more comprehensive perspective and potentially inspire new ideas for improving our own communities.

Overall, despite its few shortcomings, this article has sparked my interest and made me more aware of the importance of creating and maintaining vibrant and functional communities.

This is an extremely good book that vividly showcases the substantial negative effects of sprawl in a concise and easily comprehensible manner.

The particular observation that I find most unforgettable is how sprawl boosts the private domain of individual residences at the expense of the public realm that is permitted by the traditional neighborhood.

My sole gripe is that they exaggerate their argument regarding public preference. From my perspective, they are of the opinion that if citizens could merely fathom the advantages of traditional neighborhood design, the majority would opt for it over sprawl. However, my personal experience indicates otherwise. In the two midwestern cities where I have resided, there is an abundance of undervalued traditional housing stock in the city center at astonishingly affordable prices. Nevertheless, people continuously select the isolation of the suburbs over the community spirit of the city. As a resident of one of these traditional neighborhoods, I have endeavored to convey the extensive benefits, but the fact is that most people do not perceive it in that light.

Hopefully, this will change with the passage of time, but I anticipate it to be much slower than what the authors envision.

Cars are often considered bad for several reasons.

Firstly, they contribute significantly to air pollution. The emissions from car engines release harmful pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter into the atmosphere, which can have a negative impact on human health and the environment.

Secondly, cars are a major cause of traffic congestion. With the increasing number of cars on the road, especially in urban areas, traffic jams have become a common sight. This not only wastes people's time but also increases fuel consumption and emissions.

Finally, the production and disposal of cars also have an impact on the environment. The manufacturing process requires a large amount of energy and resources, and the disposal of old cars can lead to the release of hazardous substances.

In conclusion, while cars have brought convenience to our lives, they also have many negative impacts on the environment and society. We need to find ways to reduce the negative impacts of cars and promote the development of more sustainable transportation modes.

An eye-opener!

I came across this while browsing at the library, only to discover that my sister had already read and reviewed it. She always beats me to everything.

The first half of this book is a five-star read. It presents some truly captivating ideas. However, the second half gets bogged down in more technical aspects of planning and is more of a two-star.

I am hopeful that the author is correct when he concludes that Americans are seeking the communities that they've torn apart since the 1950s and longing for small town atmospheres.

Nonetheless, I'm afraid there is still a palpable trend among the majority of Americans towards sprawl. Towns with narrower streets that restrict car speeds and have mixed-use neighborhoods create a more pedestrian-friendly environment and, consequently, a more closely-knit community.

Deep down, in the repressed parts of their psyches, people like to walk to the post office, grocery store, and pizza parlor, get their haircuts, or take their kids to the playground.

The example of tourism to Disneyland is given, showing that people want to visit a small town and walk to shops. (Visiting NYC and Boston also comes to mind.)

It seems absurd to live in a place where, to get milk or take your kids to the swings, you have to strap them into car seats, drive, and then search for parking.

The most informative part of the book for me was the chapter that stated most people have it ingrained in them to move to the suburbs to raise their kids in relative safety.

Surprisingly, it is more dangerous to raise kids in the suburbs, with higher rates of car accidents and suicides, compared to the issues that can occur in cities and small walkable towns. (Chapter 7)

Kids and teenagers feel isolated in their car-centric environments when they have to rely on their parents to drive them to every social event. Public transportation is lacking, and for those who fled the city, it is often seen as only for the poor.

Subsequently, teenagers in the suburbs die at alarming rates from car accidents - 1/3 of all teenage deaths. How many times have we read about a carload of drunken teenagers ending up in a ball of flames on prom night?

The suburbs are not only more dangerous but also cause segregation, violence, road rage, inefficiencies, and perhaps even contribute to the decline of the American Empire.

Like many state departments of transportation, Virginia's discourages its state roads from being lined with trees, which are considered dangerous. In fact, they are not called trees at all but FHOs: Fixed and Hazardous Objects.

In suburbia, there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for everything.

Placing excessive curves and cul-de-sacs on flat land makes about as much sense as driving off-road vehicles around the city.

Streets that once served vehicles and people equitably are now designed for the sole purpose of moving vehicles through them as quickly as possible. They have become, in effect, traffic sewers.

Posting speed limits to slow traffic on high-speed roads is futile, because people drive at the speed at which they feel safe - and teenagers drive at the speed at which they feel dangerous. Generally, the only time that people don't speed in modern suburbia is when they are lost, which is, fortunately, quite often.

The simple truth is that building more highways and widening existing roads, almost always motivated by concern over traffic, does nothing to reduce traffic. In the long run, in fact, it increases traffic. This phenomenon, which is now well known to those members of the transportation industry who wish to acknowledge it, has come to be called "induced traffic".

The question is not how many lanes must be built to ease congestion but how many lanes of congestion you want. Do you favor four lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour, or sixteen? This condition is best explained by what specialists call "latent demand". Since the real constraint on driving is traffic, not cost, people are always ready to make more trips when the traffic goes away. Because of latent demand, adding lanes is futile, since drivers are already poised to use them up.

State transportation planners, intending to reduce traffic congestion, routinely commission new roadways that further disperse the population and only make traffic worse. By mistaking "mobility" for "accessibility", they undermine the viability of both new and old places by focusing entirely on moving cars through them.

This book truly changed my life. I had always had a sense of everything I learned within its pages, but I could never quite put my finger on it precisely. To put it simply, the way we have designed our suburbs ever since the end of World War II has had a detrimental impact on our country. Experts have been attempting to sound the alarm bells since the 1980s, yet we remain under the false impression that a life in the suburbs is the epitome of the perfect American experience.

In summary, modern-day suburbs have numerous negative aspects. They make people and cities poorer, isolate us from our neighbors, cause mistrust among neighbors (think of the tragic case of Treyvon Martin), are designed to deteriorate and never improve, are extremely unsafe for pedestrians (with more children being run over in cul-de-sacs than anywhere else), lead to a huge increase in air pollution, waste enormous amounts of natural resources, are the least visually appealing type of community (with garage doors stretching as far as the eye can see), increase racial and economic segregation, widen income and educational outcome disparities, group residents by age, causing inevitable deterioration over time, and there are many more problems.

Basically, modern American suburbs are the worst type of community (if one can even call them that) that humans have ever devised. And we should seriously reconsider the lessons learned from this book before we transform the next batch of land into an Ivory Homes "community." The solutions do exist (many of which are outlined in the book), and it is within our power to make them a reality.

Can be dry occasionally, but man, if anything will make you into a raving zoning maniac, this will!!

It's chock full of common sense and pokes holes through the common ideas associated with modern development. It presents a unique perspective that challenges the status quo.

It made my husband mad, and he recommended it. Now I'm mad too. How ironic is that? But in a strange way, it's also great. It gets you thinking and forces you to reevaluate your own beliefs and assumptions.

Sure, it might not be the most exciting read at times, but it's definitely thought-provoking. It makes you question the way we build and develop our cities and towns. And that's a good thing.

So, if you're looking for something that will make you think and maybe even get a little angry, give this a try. You might be surprised at what you discover.

Give me real, walkable neighborhoods,

where I can stroll along the streets and interact with my neighbors.

Give me mixed zoning, so that I have easy access to shops, restaurants, and other amenities.

Give me my small house on my small parcel of land, and I'll be content.

My midsize city still has a long way to go before it becomes the anti-sprawl utopia I envision.

However, this book has filled me with hope for the future.

It has made me truly understand why I was always so damn miserable in the suburbs.

The suburbs often lack the sense of community and the convenience that I desire.

But with the right planning and development, my city can become a place where people can live, work, and play in harmony.

I look forward to seeing the positive changes that will come in the years to come.

I found the first part of this book incredibly fascinating.

It precisely outlines what about sprawl has always been so disconcerting to me throughout my life. It also clearly points out who bears the brunt of the negative consequences of sprawl, namely children, the elderly, and anyone without access to a car.

As someone who grew up in a suburb and quite disliked it, this book put into words exactly what I find so unbearable about sprawl. There is a lack of independence, a lack of community, and a significant amount of waste generated in daily suburban life.

Thinking about suburbanization and sprawl was what initially piqued my interest in urban planning, and this book has only deepened that interest.

The second half of the book offers many concrete suggestions on steps to take to combat sprawl and mold growth into something healthy and community-building.

The authors present numerous examples of what they consider ideal communities, but many of them seem to be isolated, predominantly-white enclaves of wealth, like Celebration, Florida.

They do discuss urban infill to a decent extent, but they fail to address gentrification and the actual accessibility of these "ideal" communities to a wide variety of people.

They praise urban areas and their mixed-use development and diverse communities, but I don't see how the communities they praise here are diverse at all.

Overall, this book is very informative and interesting. It is definitely worth looking into for an in-depth description of the problem of sprawl.

The book can be divided into two parts.

The first part is the analysis of postwar suburban development. It combines undeniable facts with scathing criticism and is one of the most persuasive arguments against modern suburbia that I have ever come across.

The second part, which is significantly weaker, consists of suggestions on how to rebuild our cities. It is the kind of capitalist-friendly approach to social problems that emerged during the Clinton years.

They hold up the goddamn Disney Town in Florida as an ideal. What is wrong with you people?!

The authors correctly point out that cities need to learn some lessons from the suburbs in terms of marketing themselves. However, they go a bit too far. Instead of revitalizing urban life, the new urbanist model advocated by the authors is just a glamorized version of dull, sterile suburbanism. In the eyes of Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, resistance to gentrification is just a cynical political scheme. Poor people can move wherever they like when they are priced out. Graffiti is an unacceptable attack on the polite order, and creative people are good for driving minorities out of neighborhoods to make way for the Gap. It is an argument that takes no account of class, race, or any of the other realities of social life. Instead, it adopts the irrational economism that Americans seem to think is intellectual discourse these days. Screw this. I'm going to the nearest of the many artificial "urban villages" and poop on Whole Foods.