Resources - Suburban Green

COMMUNITY GARDENING. This all-region guide, filled with hands-on tips, offers a snapshot of today’s vibrant North American community gardening movement. Whether you are already a member of a community garden, want to get involved in one, or are just curious, this guide will inform and inspire you. Models include vegetable gardens, aesthetic and art gardens, children’s and youth gardens, and several others. Using real-life case studies from around North America, the expert contributors show how community gardening produces safe, eco-friendly food; brings neighbors together; offers valuable lessons for children; and gives each participant the personal satisfaction that comes with cultivating the land and making things grow. Like all Brooklyn Botanic Garden handbooks, this entry features sustainable and organic gardening practices.

CRABGRASS FRONTIER: THE SUBURBANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES. This first full scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.

DESIGNING THE MEGAREGION: MEETING URBAN CHALLENGES AT A NEW SCALE. In Designing the Megaregion, planning and urban design expert Jonathan Barnett describes how to redesign megaregional growth using mostly private investment, without having to wait for massive government funding or new governmental structures. Barnett explains practical initiatives to make new development fit into its environmental setting, especially important as the climate changes; reorganize transportation systems to pull together all the components of these large urban regions; and redirect the market forces which are making megaregions very unequal places.

THE END OF THE SUBURBS. In The End of the Suburbs journalist Leigh Gallagher traces the rise and fall of American suburbia from the stately railroad suburbs that sprung up outside American cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries to current-day sprawling exurbs where residents spend as much as four hours each day commuting. Along the way she shows why suburbia was unsustainable from the start and explores the hundreds of new, alternative communities that are springing up around the country and promise to reshape our way of life for the better.

A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL. Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define. This concise book engages its meaning, explains common building patterns, and illustrates the visual culture of sprawl. Seventy-five stunning color aerial photographs, each paired with a definition, convey the impact of excessive development. This "engagingly organized and splendidly photographed" (Wall Street Journal) book provides the verbal and visual vocabulary needed by professionals, public officials, and citizens to critique uncontrolled growth in the American landscape.

FROM YARD TO GARDEN: THE DOMESTICATION OF AMERICA'S HOME GROUNDS. The garden means more to Americans than simply the plants it contains: It is a gathering place, a retreat from the demands of daily life, and an extension of the family home. The history of the American home garden is fundamentally intertwined with our national culture and character, and Christopher Grampp reveals this fascinating story through engaging text and numerous images. In the early 1800s, Americans employed their home grounds for agriculture, sustenance, and domestic activities. Grampp takes this as the starting point for his narrative, from which he tracks the evolution of the American front and back yards as the nation evolved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. He connects the emergence of the modern home garden to the rise of suburbanization, the growth of city services and the post–World War II baby boom, which established the single-family home and its grounds as the ideal American dwelling.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE. The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."

THE GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD BOOK. Abandoned lots and litter-strewn pathways, or rows of green beans and pockets of wildflowers? Graffiti-marked walls and desolate bus stops, or shady refuges and comfortable seating? What transforms a dingy, inhospitable area into a dynamic gathering place? How do individuals take back their neighborhood? Neighborhoods decline when the people who live there lose their connection and no longer feel part of their community. Recapturing that sense of belonging and pride of place can be as simple as planting a civic garden or placing some benches in a park. The Great Neighborhood Book explains how most struggling communities can be revived, not by vast infusions of cash, not by government, but by the people who live there.

GREEN METROPOLIS. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

GREEN SPACE IN THE COMMUNITY. Green space in the community refers to the public space that is located in sections of residential land, often a space providing entertainment facilities and a place for the community to interact across various activities. As one of the most important components of urban green space, public green space makes a huge impact on the quality of residents' daily lives. With the rapid development of the urbanisation process, people are paying much more attention to the construction of infrastructure in their living environments, thus the construction of public green space is steadily increasing on a larger scale. The construction of green space not only helps improve the quality of residential living spaces and the level of public welfare, but these spaces also inspire residents' participation in the community.

GROWING UP WITH DICK AND JANE. Here's your chance to step back into the innocent watercolor world of Dick and Jane, where night never comes, knees never scrape, parents never yell and the fun never stops. Remember holding a Dick and Jane primer for the first time and the thrill you felt when you knew you could read? Growing Up with Dick and Jane traces the Dick and Jane phenomenon from their birth during the Depression to their retirement in the stormy 1960s. It explores the influence these little books had on education and the evolving American Dream. Packaged with a sampler of original Dick and Jane stories and cutout dolls of Dick and Jane, Growing Up with Dick and Jane stirs memories of home, school and what it was like to grow up when childhood felt like one long summer day.

HOLY LAND. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way in which a place can shape a life, Holy Land is ultimately about the resonance of choices―how wide a street should be, what to name a park―and the hopes that are realized in the habits of everyday life.

INFINITE SUBURBIA. Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Extensive research, an exhibition, and a conference at MIT's Media Lab, this groundbreaking collection presents fifty-two essays by seventy-four authors from twenty different fields, including, but not limited to, design, architecture, landscape, planning, history, demographics, social justice, familial trends, policy, energy, mobility, health, environment, economics, and applied and future technologies. This exhaustive compilation is richly illustrated with a wealth of photography, aerial drone shots, drawings, plans, diagrams, charts, maps, and archival materials, making it the definitive statement on suburbia at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

NIMBY WARS. NIMBY Wars shows how the arena of local land use regulation has been politicized and describes in explicit detail what developers - and their opponents - must do to win. NIMBY Wars distills more than 25 years of experience in the trenches of land use battles, both for and against projects as varied as a hospital and an oil refinery. Readers will learn exactly what works and what doesn't work when it comes to influencing local decision-makers faced with a controversial development proposal. Even veterans of real estate development permitting will be surprised by the sophistication, cutting-edge tactics and effectiveness of the strategies described in NIMBY Wars.

ON GOOD LAND. In the heart of suburban Santa Barbara, where land is pricey and a field is worth more covered with asphalt than arugula, asparagus, and apple trees, thrives Fairview Gardens, a small organic farm managed for the past 18 years by Michael Ableman. On Good Land, an engrossing read, chronicles the life of the 100-year-old farm -- from its history to Ableman's first glimpse of the land to the current struggle to save it from development. Blending photographs, philosophy, humor, and practical knowledge, Ableman brings the reader into the everyday world of a small farm. With him we prune peach trees, harvest peppers, journey to the farmer's market, and fight city hall. Part memoir, part photojournalistic montage, On Good Land reveals one man's love of the land and his struggle to protect it, and to spread the word about the importance of practicing sustainable agriculture and preserving our farms in an increasingly urban world.

THE OPTION OF URBANISM: INVESTING IN A NEW AMERICAN DREAM. Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy―car manufacturing and the oil industry―this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma.

PLACES IN NEED. Americans think of suburbs as prosperous areas that are relatively free from poverty and unemployment. Yet, today more poor people live in the suburbs than in cities themselves. In Places in Need, social policy expert Scott W. Allard tracks how the number of poor people living in suburbs has more than doubled over the last 25 years, with little attention from either academics or policymakers. Rising suburban poverty has not coincided with a decrease in urban poverty, meaning that solutions for reducing poverty must work in both cities and suburbs. Allard notes that because the suburban social safety net is less-developed than the urban safety net, a better understanding of suburban communities is critical for understanding and alleviating poverty in metropolitan areas.

PLANTING IN A POST-WILD WORLD. Over time, with industrialization and urban sprawl, we have driven nature out of our neighborhoods and cities. But we can invite it back by designing landscapes that look and function more like they do in the wild: robust, diverse, and visually harmonious. Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West is an inspiring call to action dedicated to the idea of a new nature—a hybrid of both the wild and the cultivated—that can ﬂourish in our cities and suburbs. This is both a post-wild manifesto and practical guide that describes how to incorporate and layer plants into plant communities to create an environment that is reﬂective of natural systems and thrives within our built world.

Books