Extremely pertinent and engrossing; essential reading for city planners.
An urban designer presents a compact case and provides practical advice for the revitalization of American cities.
City planners and urban advocates take notice: This excellent debut book may be the solution to your most vexing problems. Crandall, who co-founded an urban design firm 20 years ago and has worked on high-profile projects for cities such as Portland, Oregon, puts forth a smart, comprehensive, no-nonsense method for renewing any city. In a sobering first chapter, the author highlights and summarizes urban deficiencies he says result from three basic problems: “(1) a depletion of the retail offering, (2) the creation of a hostile pedestrian environment, and (3) the preponderance of visual blight and chaos.” He offers a litany of bulleted points for each and discusses such key issues as flawed planning, automobile emissions, and the effects of climate change. But more importantly, Crandall lucidly explains his “Transformation Strategy,” a three-part process intended to change the way city plans are created. Each of these three parts (“Public Support,” “Framework Plan,” and “Implementation Rules”) is discussed in appropriate, highly comprehensible detail in the remainder of the book. In covering Public Support, for example, the volume offers specific ways to obtain public involvement, concentrating on “information workshops,” a technique the author’s firm has used with great success. The chapter concerning the Framework Plan is the meatiest. In clear and uncomplicated fashion, Crandall talks about all the necessary elements: “healthy retail,” public spaces, urban parks and neighborhoods, employment districts, civic and cultural aspects, transportation, and implementation fundamentals. Particularly captivating in this section are brief illustrations of three “business case scenarios” that demonstrate different ways a strategy can be implemented. Also intriguing is the author’s lively discussion of “Game Changers” (“Public investments that stimulate private development momentum”) and “Silver Bullets” (“Public actions with long-term negative political and/or financial impacts”). Here, Crandall supplies specific examples from Portland and other cities, with “before” and “after” full-color photographs to enhance the text. In fact, the entire Framework Plan chapter includes superb explanatory charts and photos. The chapter regarding Implementation Rules is equally elucidating. The author deftly discusses the need for rules, the development of guidelines and standards, and the design review process, helpfully illustrating the last with a detailed chart. He also shares his “Design Guidelines Checklist,” sure to be useful to city planners. The most absorbing and forward-thinking chapter of the book, “Radical Transformation Strategy,” addresses a city’s more complex needs. Again, Crandall explains in uncomplicated terms how to implement such a tactic and uses the specific example of “what Portland must do to become proactive in regard to climate issues.” This particular case is both enthralling and prescient in terms of its relevance to future development in any city. In closing the volume, the author boldly proposes the possibility of creating a new class of professionals he calls “Urban Architects” to work on modern cities’ pressing challenges. Crandall’s eloquent treatise delivers an accomplished practitioner’s sensible perspective on what cities need to become livable.
Extremely pertinent and engrossing; essential reading for city planners.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9961040-1-2
Page Count: 149
Publisher: Fuller Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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