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› Find signed collectible books: 'Above New York: A Collection of Historical and Original Aerial Photographs of New York City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Above Chicago: A New Collection of Historical and Original Aerial Photographs of Chicago'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An American Vitruvius : An Architect's Handbook of Civic Art'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Atlas of Rare City Maps: Comparative Urban Design, 1830-1842'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-1950'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charter of the New Urbanism'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chicago Then & Now'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life'
"Learned, iconoclastic and exciting...Jacobs' diagnosis of the decay of cities in an increasingly integrated world economy is on the mark."New York Times Book Review
"Jacobs' book is inspired, idiosyncratic and personal...It is written with verve and humor; for a work of embattled theory, it is wonderfully concrete, and its leaps are breathtaking."Los Angeles Times
"Not only comprehensible but entertaining...Like Mrs. Jacobs' other books, it offers a concrete approach to an abstract and elusive subject. That, all by itself, makes for an intoxicating experience."New York Times [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities on Stone: Nineteenth Century Lithograph Images of the Urban West'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities on the Rebound: A Vision for Urban American'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities Then and Now'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities Without Suburbs'
Cities without Suburbs, first published in 1993, has become an influential analysis of America's cities among city planners, scholars, and citizens alike. In it, David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, argues that America must end the isolation of the central city from its suburbs in order to attack its urban problems.
The second edition not only employs updated census data available since publication of the first edition, but it provides more precise information about population, income, and racial trends in central cities. Updated case studies of metropolitan reforms are based on Rusk's direct involvement as a consultant in over fifty metro areas since the publication of the first edition.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities Without Suburbs: A Census 2000 Update'
Cities without Suburbs, first published in 1993, has become an influential analysis of America's cities among city planners, scholars, and citizens alike. In it, David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, argues that America must end the isolation of the central city from its suburbs in order to attack its urban problems.
Rusk's analysis, extending back to 1950, covers 522 central cities in 320 metro areas of the United States. He finds that cities trapped within old boundaries have suffered severe racial segregation and the emergence of an urban underclass. But cities with annexation powerstermed "elastic" by Ruskhave shared in area-wide development.
This third edition is among the first books of any kind to employ information from the 2000 U.S. census. While refining his argument with this new data, Rusk assesses the major trends of the 1990s, including the perceived rebound of central cities, the impact of Hispanic and Asian migration, the growing similarities of older "inner-ring" suburbs to central cities, and the emerging influence of faith-based movements. New recommendations take account of growing restrictions on cities' annexation powers, even in the Southwestern United States, and of new opportunities for federal shaping of home mortgage programs and urban planning processes. Rusk's conclusion stresses cities' growing experience with building political coalitions in pursuit of development and growth.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cities, the Forces That Shape Them'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World'
In City Life, Witold Rybczynski looks at what we want from cities, how they have evolved, and what accounts for their unique identities. In this vivid description of everything from the early colonial settlements to the advent of the skyscraper to the changes wrought by the automobile, the telephone, the airplane, and telecommuting, Rybczynski reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the landscapes and lifestyles of the New World. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History'
Spanning the ages and the globe, Spiro Kostof explores the city as a "repository of cultural meaning" and an embodiment of the community it shelters. Widely used by both architects and students of architecture, The City Shaped won the AIA's prestigious book award in Architecture and Urbanism. With hundreds of photographs and drawings that illustrate Professor Kostof's innovative ideas, this has become one of the most important works on urbanization. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'City Spaces: Photographs of Chicago Alleys'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Citymaze: A Collection of Amazing City Mazes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'
Jane Jacobs sets out to produce an attack on current city-planning and rebuilding in America and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on the urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid "scientific" plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground. The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Design of Cities'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America'
Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims. Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, seems like an odd choice but it works. The magical appeal and horrifying dark side of 19th-century Chicago are both revealed through Larson's skillful writing. --John Moe [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Down & Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis's Skid Row'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Energy and Land Use'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Engineering the City: How Infrastructure Works'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fort Towns of France: The Bastides of the Dordogne and Aquitaine'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape'
An analysis of America's national landscape argues that much of what surrounds Americans is depressing, ugly, and unhealthy and traces America's evolution from a land of village commons to a man-made landscape that ignores nature and human needs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Streets'
This book received Honorable Mention in the category of Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1993 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.
Which are the world's best streets, and what are the physical, designable characteristics that make them great? To answer these questions, Allan Jacobs has surveyed street users and design professionals and has studied a wide array of street types and urban spaces around the world. With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared. It also reveals Jacobs's eye for the telling human and social details that bring streets and communities to life.
An extensive introduction discusses the importance of streets in creating communities and criteria for identifying the best streets. The essays that follow examine 15 particularly fine streets, ranging from medieval streets in Rome and Copenhagen to Venice's Grand Canal, from Parisian boulevards to tree-lined residential streets in American cities. Jacobs also looks at several streets that were once very fine but are less successful today, such as Market Street in San Francisco, identifying the factors that figure in their decline.
To broaden his coverage, Jacobs adds briefer treatments of more than 30 other streets arranged by street type, including streets from Australia, Japan, and classical antiquity in addition to European and North American examples. For each of these streets he has prepared plans, sections, and maps, all drawn at the same scales to facilitate comparisons, along with perspective views and drawings of significant design details.
Another remarkable feature of this book is a set of 50 one square-mile maps, each reproduced at the same scale, of the street plans of representative cities around the world. These reveal much about the texture of the cities' street patterns and hence of their urban life. Jacobs's analysis of the maps adds much original data derived from them, including changes of street patterns over time.
Jacobs concludes by summarizing the practical design qualities and strategies that have contributed most to the making of great streets. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hollywood: The First Hundred Years'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built'
This book on buildings asks the question why so many buildings punish and restrict us because almost none of them adapt well. In real use, buildings need to adapt because their uses are constantly changing. All buildings are predictions, and yet more high-style buildings are designed not to change, not to accommodate new use. A good portion of how buildings learn will be a natural history of how buildings change with time and what things work to make buildings adapt gracefully, what building layouts allow easy redefinition of space and building code considerations that permit remodelling. This practical book aims to integrate all the different aspects of the fragmented design and construction process, so that buildings can be seen as embodying a functional, yet aesthetic and capacious vision, not the conflicts, compromises and conveniences of clients, architects, engineers and contractors, all working in their interests, not the buildings. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How the Other Half Lives'
› Find signed collectible books: 'How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York'
"How the Other Half Lives" is a chronicle of the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century had to endure. Riis, who as an immigrant himself lived in these tenements on the lower east side of Manhattan, exposed the horrible conditions while working as a reporter for the New York Tribune. This book when first published in 1890 shed a much-needed light on the conditions of the poor. Presented here is a reproduction of that original 1890 edition with the numerous illustrations included in that volume. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Image of the City'
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities.The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Impossible Worlds'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Little House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'London: A Pilgrimage'
'London: A Pilgrimage' was conceived in 1868 by the journalist and playwright Blanchard Jerrold. Accompanied by the famous artist Gustave Doré, Jerrold prowled every corner of the heaving metropolis, sometimes with plain-clothes police for protection. 'London: A Pilgrimage' is a forgotten classic of social journalism, a frank and brutal look at the poverty striken, gin-swilling London of the nineteenth century, written in a perceptive, bold and gripping style.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost Chicago'
30th Anniversary
These dazzling, poignant pages recreate the magical built environment that thrilled generations of Chicago residents and visitors alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress.
Here are the grand residences and hotels, opulent theaters, legendary trains, and state-of-the-art office buildings and department storesincluding the worlds first skyscraper. Here too are the famous convention halls, parks, and racetracks of a great American city whose architectural treasures have been, and continue to be, recklessly squandered.
Rare photographs and prints, many of them published here for the first time, document the transformative architectural achievements of such giants as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, John Wellburn Root, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But this remarkable book is much more than a portfolio of now-vanished buildings; within its pages are evocative sketches of scores of Chicago personalities, from the world-famous (Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Dreiser, Clarence Darrow, Ben Hecht, Jane Addams, Cyrus McCormick, George Pullman, and Gustavus Swift, to name just a few) to the locally notorious. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style, 1850-1900'
***We take care of our customers*** [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mayors' Institute : Excellence in City Design'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New American Village'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Civic Art: Elemments of Town Planning'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community'
The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community [Hardcover] by Katz, Peter [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction'
The second of three books published by the Center for Environmental Structure to provide a "working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning," A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. The reader is given an overview of some 250 patterns that are the units of this language, each consisting of a design problem, discussion, illustration, and solution. By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Perfect City'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Points + Lines : Diagrams and Projects for the City'
Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City is a book of New York architect Stan Allen's writings and projects that propose new architectural strategies for the contemporary city. Organized in the form of a user's manual, it juxtaposes speculative texts outlining Allen's general principles with specific projects created by his office.
The book's title refers to this interplay of practice and theory, evoking not only the points of activity and the paths of movement found in a contemporary city but also the points of speculation and lines of argument in theoretical discourse.
Projects include the Cardiff Bay Opera House, Wales; the Korean-American Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museo del Prado, Madrid; and White Columns Gallery, New York. Each project is accompanied by explanatory text as well as numerous drawings, models, photographs, and computer renderings. K. Michael Hays contributes an introductory essay; R. E. Somol writes the postscript. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Production of Houses'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Renaissance City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Robert Polidori's Metropolis'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scenic Daguerreotype: Romanticism and Early Photography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sky's the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Social Life of Small Urban Spaces'
In 1980, William H. Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.
Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Hollys Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Hollys legacy. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stalking Detroit'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs, and Towns'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Suzhou: Shaping an Ancient City for the New China An Edaw/Pei Workshop'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Timeless Way of Building'
The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is deeply wrong. Yet the power of present-day ideas is so great that many feel uncomfortable, even afraid, to say openly that they dislike what is happening, because they are afraid to seem foolish, afraid perhaps that they will be laughed at.
Now, at last, there is a coherent theory which describes in modern terms an architecture as ancient as human society itself.
The Timeless Way of Building is the introductory volume in the Center for Environmental Structure series, Christopher Alexander presents in it a new theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being.
Alexander writes, "There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills, and as our faces are." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Town Planning in Frontier America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Town Spaces : New Traditionalism in Urban Design Today'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Town Spaces: Contemporary Interpretations in Traditional Urbanism, Krier, Kohl, Archtitects'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Towns and Townmaking Principles'
classic on the designing of towns [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Urban Open Spaces'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Urban Space'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Urban Spaces No. 3'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Urban Spaces: The Design of Public Places'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Visions for a New American Dream: Process, Principles, & an Ordinance to Plan & Design Small Communities'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Washington, Design of the Federal City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Washington, Design of the Federal City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wealth of Cities'
Milwaukee Mayor Norquist, a first-time author, appropriately alludes to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in his title. This strongly free-market book blames bad government policy for much of what's gone wrong with cities. He names a few familiar enemies, such as welfare's culture of dependency and the government monopoly on public education. More interesting, however, is his analysis of how government created the suburbs through road construction and housing subsidies--public actions that gave people the means to abandon once-thriving urban cores. Norquist describes how some cities have begun to turn the corner, and also recommends a series of commonsense public policies. Politicians have a knack for writing books that say nothing, but Norquist offers a thoughtful analysis of urban America, one that avoids the tired answers of both Left and Right and sets forth its own unique vision. --John J. Miller [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life'
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