Building Cities That Work

Since 1945, North Americans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on urban development, literally transforming the landscape of the continent. This development has been disastrous, Edmund Fowler maintains, because it is inordinately expensive, destructive of the environment, and disruptive of healthy social life and authentic politics. Revealing the connections between our basic cultural beliefs and why we build the way we do, he stresses that to build cities that work we must become aware of how our personal choices contribute to the form of the built environment.