To escape the tough streets of Southeast Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, young Rodney Stotts would ride the metro to the Smithsonian National Zoo. There, the bald eagles and other birds of prey captured his imagination for the first time. In...
Books
Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places
The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvement project, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the...
216 pages
6 x 9
57 figures
How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life
On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across four lanes of traffic, then scurrying through a narrow underpass as cars whizzed by...
352 pages
6 x 9
14 photos
Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities
For decades, American cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. These efforts, often driven by grassroots activism, offer valuable lessons for transforming the places we live. In From the...
304 pages
7 x 10
81 photos, 32 illustrations
Taking Conservation to Scale in Complex Systems
As environmental problems grow larger and more pressing, conservationists have had to adapt. With a shrinking window of time to act, they are turning to broad approaches to combat continental- and global-scale crises of biodiversity loss,...
328 pages
7 x 10
135 figures/illustrations
How Communities Can Recover from Trauma and Rebuild for Health
Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Place Book Award Winner (2022) What if cities around the world actively worked to promote the health and healing of all of their residents? Cities contribute to the traumas that cause...
288 pages
6 x 9
49 figures/photos
Illustrated Insights for Ecological Restoration from Volunteer Stewards of Chicago Wilderness
The Chicago metropolitan area is home to far more protected nature than most people realize. Over half a million acres of protected land known as the Chicago Wilderness are owned and managed by county forest preserve districts and other public...
168 pages
7 x 10
216 photos and illustrations
The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving
“The foundation has been laid for fully autonomous,” Elon Musk announced in 2016, when he assured the world that Tesla would have a driverless fleet on the road in 2017. “It’s twice as safe as a human, maybe better....
320 pages
5 x 8
8 figures
Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat
In a world filled with breathtaking beauty, we have often overlooked the elusive charm and magic of certain landscapes. A cloudy river flows into a verdant Arctic wetland where sandhill cranes and muskoxen dwell. Further south, cypress branches...
312 pages
6 x 9
8 photos, 7 illustrations