Regional Planning for a Sustainable America

Regional Planning for a Sustainable America is the first book to represent the great variety of todays effective regional planning programs, analyzing dozens of regional initiatives across North America. The American landscape is being transformed by poorly designed, sprawling development. This sprawland its wasteful resource use, traffic, and pollutiondoes not respect arbitrary political boundaries like city limits and state borders. Yet for most of the nation, the patterns of development and conservation are shaped by fragmented, parochial local governments and property developers focused on short-term economic gain. Regional planning provides a solution, a means to manage human impacts on a large geographic scale that better matches the natural and economic forces at work. By bringing together the expertise of forty-two practitioners and academics, this book provides a practical guide to the key strategies that regional planners are using to achieve truly sustainable growth.