5 comments about The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town.

1. Andrew Ross's, The Celebration Chronicles, is a scholarly interpretation of the neo-traditional ideal and how it manifests itself with the development of a Florida community. From the onset of the book, it appears as if Celebration is everything that the Disney executives had envisioned and everything that the residents had hoped ---- but is it?

   Ross, however, delays peeling back the town's veneer and instead takes us on a sight seeing tour of Celebration ---- along the way we can see palm-lined promenades, a beautiful lake, neo-traditional homes and stately designed commercial/residential buildings. The author, respectfully, gives deference to the key architectural styles ---- Anglo-Caribbean, Low Country and St Augustine. Ultimately, our travels along Market St take us to the town square and we feel somehow that Disney has delivered.

   Then the serious questions begin and the reader becomes privy to a host of controversies ---- shoddy home construction, the prohibitive cost to live in Celebration, conflicts over the educational agenda of the K-12 school and a questionable commitment to social and ethnic diversity.
   
   Ross's observations may reflect an intellectual detachment. But the reader will discover that the book has its share of levity and amusing anecdotes. He notes, for example, the following ---- rumors of gypsies taking up residence and a resident heard to say, "What we need are a few drunks around this town."

   This book is a serious study. Forewarned ---- you won't find the vanity-fair critiques so pervasive in glossy journals and travel tabloids. What you will find, though, are the author's lengthy observations that attempt to explain all the factors ---- both positive and negative ---- that impact life in the community of Celebration. Eventually the book evolves into a valuable lesson on urban history and social science. I, as a reader, found the process of getting to this eventuality fulfilling and I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in these topics.




2. Reading this book was like watching paint dry....I moved to Celebration in 1998. At first I was charmed by the Disney connection, distinctive house designs (for florida anyway), the nice, well kept streets.

   Fast forward several years....

   Celebration now has a -- TERRIBLE -- reputation in the central florida area for being snotty and elitist. It's is a shame what has become of Celebration. Someone should write a book about that.




3. I had the chance to visit Celebration this spring on a trip to WDW. I found the book interesting and inciteful in learning more about this community. I believe readers will get a very well written account of life in this community at its inception as well as Ross's take on this community. A good read.



4. What a piece of liberal trash! My five year old found it useful to press flowers.



5. I read this book after reading Celebration, USA by Douglas Franz and Catherine Collins. The Celebration Chronicles is not worth the money. Mr. Ross has written a "scholarly" work which manages to examine Celebration at arm's length. Mr. Ross obtaining an apartment in Celebration, a community he clearly has no vested interest in, does not qualify as being a truly involved resident of a newly created, struggling community. Franz and Collins give much better insight, mostly because they have invested in a home and are truly involved in the growth of the community.

   For a historical, sanitary view, choose Ross' account.

3 comments about Studio at Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities.

1. This is a great book for both those people who are interested in learning about or those people who are already familiar with environmentally friendly "green" building pratices used in sustainable architecture. Studio at Large specifically chronicles the achievements of the UW BASIC Initiative program that Sergio Palleroni and his colleagues created in 1995. It is fascinating and moving to see the impact this work has on the local and global levels in society.



2. Prof. Sergio Palleroni teaches the "art-and-science" of "architecture" the old fashion way--with leadership and passion! He's not affraid of rolling up his sleeves, soiling his boot and spending his summer vacations whith his students (the future leaders): teachong design, scheduling and building sustainable communities in the "developing countries."



3. Its good to see that the rural studios work is not unique but rather part of a movement, with other brilliant examples such as the work documented in this book. Beautifully illustrated. Probably the most in depth discussion I've read on the methods and challenges of work among the poor and underserved.
   A great contribution to architectures claim to relevance.

5 comments about City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, Revised Edition.

1. This is an absolutely wonderful little book. Don't let its small size and informal demeanor fool you - It is a very thorough, practical, and well reasoned guide (and yes, it is a guide, not just a bunch of theory with questionable applicablility in the real world) to designing urban areas with people in mind. Sucher has done a tremendous job of creating a book that is straightforward and easy to read, but still a serious work of planning and design. If you have any interest at all in those subjects, this is one book you should definitely have in your collection.



2. A great book, no matter what your area of emloyment or study! Everyone who is interested in better neighborhoods and friendlier living within communities should read this book. It's easily accessible, upbeat, and totally practical. This slim volume offers wonderful soloutions to problems that face every community. I would recommend it to anyone, and have given it as gifts to several people I know. (I'm secretly hoping that there will be a follow-up to this book.) This is really a book you will be glad you've read!



3. In the first couple of pages of this book, David Sucher captures the struggle of modern urban planning: how do you make a place feel "urban" (bustling, a degree of anonymity, culture and complexity) and like a "village" (friendly, natural, community-oriented) at the same time?
   
   The answers are here, in refreshingly easy-to-understand language that is also easy to implement. Good planning isn't a mystery, but so many cities and towns have done it so poorly for so long. I like to think that American planning is at the beginning of a renaissance (I have to think that, I'm in planning school) and people like David Sucher are making it happen. This should be on your shelf next to Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte.



4. I am so glad that David Sucher has revised and reissued this book. I used the first edition for several courses that I teach in community development and urban planning, and I know of no better single volume text on urban design issues. The new edition is even better. The book is particularly useful for those who have an interest in planning and design issues, but have limited technical training or experience. As a consequence, it makes excellent reading for city planning commissioners.



5. This book provides brevity with depth. It reminds you about all those little things that sometimes get left out during development, but which make a world of difference to the people who live in it. Plenty of examples are provided, usually with the thought behind why they work. The author clearly enjoys his native city because almost all the examples come from the Northwest, but this makes them no less impactful. I highly recommend this book to students of architecture/planning, developers, city officials, or anyone who has an interest in the "little things" that make our built environment better. This would be a GREAT book for anyone who has any influence in high growth subruban areas--neighborhood assns., zoning officials, subdivision developers, etc. Enjoy!

No comments about New Urban Housing.

No comments about Street Furniture.

No comments about Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York.

1 comments about Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area.

1. There is a recent, substantial review of this guidebook by Steven Finacom in the Berkeley Daily Planet, Weekday Edition, Oct.30-Nov.1, 2007. Some excerpts are:
   "A long-awaited, much-needed, and up-to-date guide to the great and representative buildings and architectural history of the Bay Area debuts this month."....
   "This guide is organized geographically by county, with individual cities, districts, and structures provided. The writers went into the field with notebook and camera as well as consulting an array of historical documents, surveys, and local experts." ....
   "Architecturally, the most prominent local communities such as San Francisco and Berkeley have been well covered by previous guides (including two written by Cerny) and published architectural histories. However, many smaller or less visible Bay Area towns, cities and neighborhoods have been overlooked.
   "This book, with more than 500 pages of text and over 2,000 individual entries, rectifies the imbalance and provides a regional perspective, addressing not just the older city centers but the suburbs, and profiling their major edifices and representative structures from cattle ranching days to Gold Rush to dot-com boom." ....
   "They [Cerny and her co-authors] brought a catholic sensibility to their writing and selection of projects, respectfully showing the whole panorama of Bay Area architectural history and urban development." ....
   "If you're at all interested in the architecture and history of the Bay Area, this will be an indispensable reference to own. I may, in fact, get two copies; one for home, and one that stays in the car, so that on trips through the Bay Area, quick answers to "what building is that?" can finally be found."

3 comments about Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development.

1. As a rural resident trying to help my town control predatory developers and manage issues of growth and land use, this book is a potent tool, a fact that is clearly disturbing to some who stand to profit handsomely from sprawl, like the automobile and oil companies, the large-scale construction industries, millionaire developers, automobile manufacturers, and big-box national retailers.
   
   It's interesting that Diane Bast has written a negative review without mentioning, either here or in her Amazon.com profile, that she holds the title of Vice President of Internal Affairs for the benign-sounding (and Richard Mellon Schiafe-funded) "Heartland Institute," whose work she cites here.
   
   She also fails to mention that her husband Joseph L. Bast is also founder, president and CEO of the Institute, whose board of directors includes representatives from General Motors, Exxon-Mobil, and Philip Morris, along with various banks and insurance companies. The Institute has also over the years received substantial funding from the tobacco industry, among other large multinational companies. Of course, none of these board members mention these affiliations on Heartland's flowers-and-little-kids adorned official website, because that would be giving the real purpose of the organization away.
   
   I doubt that such an organization would subsidize any research which would support public transportation or de-emphasize converting far-flung farmland or open space into cookie-cutter subdivisions, so Ms. Bast's citations are unsurprising given her unmentioned affiliation to that organization.
   
   As for Mr. Cox, a quick check of his consultancy website reveals his purpose is to denigrate comprehensive planning efforts (because they supposedly put constraints on private ownership and the so-called "free market") and to promote gasoline-powered transportation over rail, public transportation and other environmentally- friendly alternatives. (In the 1920s and 30s, a consortium of carmakers and tire manufacturers bought up and dismantled existing electric trolley systems in major cities, and Mr. Cox and his colleagues are apparently dedicated to making sure that such systems stay dead.)
   
   In fact, despite Ms. Bast's derision of "politics" as a factor in the costs of sprawl, the Heartland Institute has been more than willing to use politics to its own corporate ends, including coordinating the blast-faxing of legislators to oppose or overturn anti-smoking, pro-environmental and health-care regulatory legislation that could cut into the profits of its benefactor companies. Despite her sprinkling her review with references to the poor and minorities, her organization believes in unfettered corporate power, first and foremost. I believe the reader should take that into account when reading her comments.
   
   The fact remains that sprawl enriches developers, car manufacturers, oil and real estate companies much, much more than individual homeowners, who find that as gas hits $3 - $4 a gallon and above, and their property taxes jump as overburdened small towns try to cope with the sudden need to build new schools and keep formerly little-used town roads in repair, that their "affordable" homes cost them more to own than they imagined -- and that the only part of the supposed wealth they generate is when they sell them, long after the strip-mall, big-box and cookie-cutter developers have pocketed their profits and gone elsewhere.
   
   There is a biological analog to unfettered and out of control growth. It's called "cancer." Cancer eventually kills its host. Sprawl kills community life and saps a region's vitality. This book lays out the evidence in black and white.
   
   For more information on the Heartland Institute, go to www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute.



2. According to an article by Wendell Cox, senior fellow for The Heartland Institute, this book rehashes the tired claims about suburbanization (pejoratively called "urban sprawl") being unnecessarily costly. In fact, however, Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development (by Robert Burchell, Anthony Downs, Barbara McCann, and Sahan Mukheri) relies on prospective data that is soundly refuted by reality.
   
   The book is an outgrowth of a study led by Burchell, which concluded that more compact (less suburban) development could save $225,000,000,000 in government spending over 25 years. The study made the all-too-common error of concluding that many zeros after a number make it significant. They do not. It will probably take the average reader at least 225,000,000,000 nanoseconds to read this article. $225 billion over 25 years is less than $30 per capita each year. This is a pittance in comparison with overall government expenditures, which have risen more than 100 times that fast over the past 25 years after adjustment for inflation.
   
   Aside from the shock value, the validity of the numbers is questionable. In fact, the suburbs are not more expensive. Joshua Utt and I published research analyzing Bureau of the Census data for more than 700 municipalities concluding that actual (not theoretical) per-capita public expenditures are lowest in the newer suburbs. Even sewer costs were found to be lowest in the newer suburbs. The principal reasons are that politics, congestion, and labor costs drive costs higher in more compact development.
   
   Sprawl Costs' weakest assertion may be that more compact development would reduce the cost of an average new house $16,000, a conjecture that ignores economic reality. To accomplish the more compact development Burchell et al. would prefer requires stringent regulation, such as urban growth boundaries, greenbelts, and other limits on development. Rationing land, like anything else, results in higher prices. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, in work published by Harvard University, reported that the principal cause of differences in housing affordability among U.S. metropolitan areas is zoning and land regulation.
   
   The current "housing bubble" is most pronounced where there is strong land rationing-places like California, Portland, and the Northeast, from Boston to Washington's Virginia and Maryland suburbs. In the past five years actual house prices in those areas have risen $200,000 more than the average in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston, growth dynamos where there is little land rationing. In just five years, the conjectural $16,000 savings over 25 years have been consumed 12 times over by the actual excess price increases in areas that have implemented the very strategies required to compel the compact development advocated by Burchell et al.
   
   Moreover, with minority home ownership in the U.S. a full third below the Non-Hispanic White homeownership rate, the cost-increasing effects of land rationing are today denying opportunity and blocking the ladder to the economic mainstream. Of course, the higher prices will also drive other millions out of the homeownership market.
   
   All of this shifts wealth from young to old and poorer to richer in a perverse trickle-up economy. The American Dream is under threat. A nation of renters will be less affluent.
   
   None of this is to suggest that suburbanization should be the favored form of urban development. Instead, people should be allowed to live and work where and how they like. Anti-suburban interests have yet to find a compelling reason why this should not be so.
   
   Sprawl Costs misses the economic opportunities and wealth that have been created by broad home ownership, made possible by building new houses on inexpensive land in the suburbs. It is not surprising that virtually all urban growth in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has been suburban for decades. Consumers know better. What Burchell et al. perceive as costs are really benefits.
   
   Wendell Cox (cox@heartland.org) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.



3. I just heard one of the authors on talk radio out here and must say that I was blown away by the amount of money sprawl costs every year. Just making a list of the items that tap into our tax dollars is staggering: schools, highways, sewers, electricity, water. And if you watch a new housing development going into the desert, this fact is so obvious---much of the bill must be paid by all the rest of us, how else could they afford all those big costs. So I know the argument for sprawl is that if we didn't have it, housing prices would go through the roof. But one sensible point this author made is that with a very limited change in the way we live, would result in a massive savings to our government spending. So I hope people will listen to this message cause it seems to make sense to me. Looking forward to reading the book, and I hope government officials will as well.

No comments about The Urban Design Reader (Routledge Urban Readers).

No comments about Fluent in Fantasy: The Next Generation (Genreflecting Advisory Series).