{"product_id":"9780978872854","title":"Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices","description":"\"Unplanning is a wonderful read! It is beautifully written, it takes up extremely important and timely topics, and it offers a new and concrete approach to democracy and sustainability. I enjoy going back almost at random to read and re-read pages and passages from it. It's very engaging and stimulating - and it should be read by every environmentalist.\"\u003cp\u003e- Prof. Charles Derber, author of Greed to Green\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe conventional wisdom says that we need strict planning to build walkable neighborhoods around transit stations - even though these neighborhoods are like the streetcar suburbs that were common in America before anyone heard of city planning. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn reality, many of our greatest successes in urban design have occurred when we treated the issues as political questions - not as technical problems that the planners should solve for us. The anti-freeway movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the anti-sprawl movement of recent decades were both political movements, and citizen-activists often had to work against projects that planners proposed and approved. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book uses an intriguing thought experiment to show that, in order to build livable cities, we should go further than the anti-freeway and anti-sprawl movements by putting direct political limits on urban growth. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePolitical choices about how we want to live can transform our cities more effectively than planning.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Preservation Institute","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49795996156144,"sku":"9780978872854","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780978872854","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}