True Urbanism: Living In and Near the Center

Mark Hinshaw has a proposition for Americans: Come out of your bunker, throw open the gate, and meet the neighborhood. True Urbanism, his passionate and highly readable appeal for re-engagement with city life, celebrates the growing number of people who reject sterile, paint-by-numbers subdivisions in favor of rich, vibrant, and often unpredictable urban neighborhoods.Through a series of fascinating case studies, this volume demonstrates how cities can create mixed-use districts dense enough to support a variety of locally owned businesses, lively street life, and cultural institutions, while also outlining design guidelines that allow for architectural creativity and regulations that promote housing development for every income and age level. Now that the dust has settled from the late-twentieth-century development boom, this vivid account of cities large and small will show communities how to shed their lingering antiurban tendencies in favor of embracing density as destiny.