Issues: Smart Growth

Solving Sprawl
Models of Smart Growth in Communities Across America


Sprawl is taking a grave toll on our environment and the way we live, giving us mind-numbing traffic, ugly strip development, fragmented communities, and loss of open space. In the seemingly disconnected jumble of subdivisions and empty downtowns, a sense of place seems harder and harder to find. But this November 2001 book from NRDC, Solving Sprawl, offers an inspiring contrast to these grim trends. Through 35 real-world stories, the book illustrates how people in cities, suburbs, and rural areas have found profitable, community-oriented alternatives to sprawl.

Solving Sprawl contains 200 pages of in-depth descriptions, accessible text, color photographs, sidebar discussions of important issues related to smart growth and sprawl, and summaries highlighting basic project data, the parties responsible, and the particular features that make each project noteworthy.

Photo of book cover
  by F. Kaid Benfield, Jutka Terris and Nancy Vorsanger

This book is available from Island Press.

OVERVIEW & QUICK REFERENCE
Press Release
Summary
Photo Album

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword by Maryland Governor Parris N. Glendening
Chapter 1: Solving Sprawl with Smart Growth
Chapter 2: Smart Cities
Chapter 3: Smart Suburbs
Chapter 4: Smart Conservation
Chapter 5: The Not-So-Impossible Dream

EXCERPTS
Dallas Uptown Dallas, Texas
Orenco Station Hillsboro, Oregon
Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve Montgomery County, Maryland

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SOLVING SPRAWL

"Stopping sprawl is not just a utopian theory, it is an active practice -- and the case studies presented here prove the point. Solving Sprawl is the best summary of the real choices we have to build better communities today."
- Peter Calthorpe, architect and author, The Next American Metropolis
"Solving Sprawl offers exactly what developing communities need, exactly when they need it: an abundance of stories that show there's a better way to grow. This is storytelling at its finest -- readers will be richly informed and greatly inspired."
- Don Chen, director, Smart Growth America

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