Unsprawl

By Simmons B. Buntin with Ken Pirie
Foreword by Galina Tachieva

Planetizen Press, 2013

These projects show that with creativity and dedication, even the most distressed communities can chart a new course for their future. To create dynamic places takes dynamic leadership.

Unwinding the unsustainable ways in which we’ve built our communities over the last half-century is the most pressing challenge confronting planning, design, and development today. Utilizing a dozen case studies from throughout North America, Unsprawl examines the visionary, controversial and ultimately successful strategies employed to introduce new patterns of development into a regulatory, cultural, and financial landscape structured to encourage sprawl.

As architect Galina Tachieva notes in her foreword, “Whether they are downtown redevelopments, new greenfield villages, retrofits, or ambitious sustainability experiments, the projects in this book demonstrate the long-needed revival of our thinking about urbanism.”

Reviews

“Civano and the other communities studied in Unsprawl show that the technology is available to enable a ‘green’ living space, and that by applying knowledge, common sense, and respect, people can share the land with the non-human world. All that remains is the will to make human communities work. The pioneers in this new way of living have such a will, and I have a sense that they share with Sanders the elements of the ‘common life’ . . . and that they relish moments of the joy of being where they should be and doing the right thing.”
— Doug Carlson, The Georgia Review

“While there are clear reasons why we need to unsprawl, this is a focused how-to book. Exploring all aspects of a project from concept to design and through to its execution, there are lots of details about how projects were financed and built.”
— The Dirt, American Society of Landscape Architects

“It is the personal perspectives that differentiate this collection from other compendiums as they lend intimacy that is more commonly found at a conference than in a book. It is almost as if the reader is eavesdropping on private conversations amongst stakeholders, where their true feelings, ambitions and frustrations are on display alongside the concise project summaries.”
— Lisbeth Sinclair, Senior Regional Planner at the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning