Book of the Day

My pick for Book of the Day is Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the America Dream - Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck. The authors are architects who designed several sensible communities, and argue persuasively that the current design of suburbia is fundamentally flawed, and seek to take us back (and forward) to the days when communities were not zoned residential and commerical, where pedestrian-friendly designs meant you didn't drive to the store, where traffic jams are nonexistant because of the dispersion of the road network (where all traffic doesn't feed into a collector), accident rates are significantly lower, and most important, where residents can feel a sense of community, where rich and poor live in the same neighborhood. The book drives these points home with several photographs of communities good and bad, and had it not been the pangs of hunger, I may never have put the book down.