Book selection: "This Land" by Anthony Flint

[KamaAina]

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Tony (though we've never met, his mom and mine worked together for years) covered land use-related issues for the Boston Globe for years, back when the Globe was one of the few papers that still mattered. Here he addresses how we got into the mess we're in in terms of sprawl, and how we might, maybe, possibly be able to get out of it. It's not a pure anti-growth screed by any means: Tony points out that the highly touted New Urbanist developments such as Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Md. are not only off-the-charts expensive, but are often located far from transit (a 25-minute bus ride from Kentlands to the Red Line, then the Red Line itself, for instance). But it does point out that sprawl developments become less and less livable almost from the day the sod is rolled out in front of the cookie-cutter homes.

Anyone else read it? I didn't finish while I was at Mom's, though she said she'd send her (autographed, of course) copy in my birthday box in a couple of weeks.

[ramapo]

1. Will look for it

Thanks for the pointer.

Just finished Suburban Nation. A good book, certainly not anti-growth but much on the NU communities and the need to revitalize the city over sprawl. The authors had nothing to say about what we do to "fix" the problems created by sprawl. Perhaps they think they'll be a gradual move back to the center with the exhurbs returning to farming and nature.