Investment has flooded back to cities because dense, walkable, mixed-use urban environments offer choices that support diverse dreams. Auto-oriented, single-use suburbs have a hard time competing.

Suburban Remix brings together experts in planning, urban design, real estate development, and urban policy to demonstrate how suburbs can use growing demand for urban living to renew their appeal as places to live, work, play, and invest. The case studies and analysis show how compact new urban places are being created in suburbs to produce health, economic, and environmental benefits, and contribute to solving a growing equity crisis.

How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.

Beyond Mobility is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies.
 
There are many examples of communities across the globe working to create a seamless fit between transit and surrounding land uses, retrofit car-oriented suburbs, reclaim surplus or dangerous roadways for other activities, and revitalize neglected urban spaces like abandoned railways in urban centers.
 
The authors draw on experiences and data from a range of cities and countries around the globe in making the case for moving beyond mobility.

National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working on the ground to present a new vision for creating resilience. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how it requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that it starts and ends with the people living in a community.

From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for community leaders, college students, and concerned citizens.

The near-unanimous consensus among climate scientists is that the massive burning of gas, oil, and coal is having cataclysmic impacts on our atmosphere and climate. These climate and environmental impacts are particularly magnified and debilitating for low-income communities and communities of color.  
 
Energy democracy tenders a response and joins the environmental and climate movement with broader movements for social and economic change in this country and around the world.
 
Energy Democracy brings together racial, cultural, and generational perspectives to show what an alternative, democratized energy future can look like. The book will inspire others to take up the struggle to build the energy democracy movement. 

Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, First Place (2017)
"Reads like a mystery novel as Gillam skillfully uncovers Monsanto's secretive strategies."—Erin Brockovich
"A damning picture...Gillam expertly covers a contentious front." —Publishers Weekly
"A must-read." —Booklist
"Hard-hitting, eye-opening narrative." —Kirkus

In Whitewash, veteran journalist Carey Gillam uncovers one of the most controversial stories in the history of food and agriculture. Gillam explores the global debate over the safety of a herbicide so pervasive that it is found in our cereals, snacks, and even in our urine. Known as Monsanto’s Roundup by consumers and as glyphosate by scientists, the world’s most popular weed killer is sold as safe enough to drink, but Gillam’s research shows that message has been carefully crafted to conceal a host of dangers. Whitewash is more than an exposé about the hazards of one chemical. It’s a story of power, politics, and the deadly consequences of putting corporate interests ahead of public safety.

"I can't recommend John Cary's book, Design for Good, highly enough. His argument...is clear and revolutionary." —Melinda Gates

In Design for Good, John Cary offers character-driven, real-world stories about projects across the globe that are designed and created with and for the people who will use them. The book reveals a new understanding of the ways that design shapes our lives and gives professionals and interested citizens the tools necessary to seek out and demand designs that dignify. 
 
From Rwanda’s Butaro Hospital to Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, the examples in the book show what is possible when design is a collaborative, dignified, empathic process. Cary draws from his own experience as well as dozens of interviews to show not only that everyone deserves good design, but how it can be achieved.

Over more than twenty years as a mediator, Aaron T. Wolf has learned that successful conflict resolution is shaped by complicated dynamics—from how comfortable the meeting room is to the participants’ deepest senses of self. Bridging seemingly intractable issues means addressing multiple layers of needs. Wolf’s approach may be surprising to Westerners who are accustomed to separating rationality from spirituality and science from religion. The Spirit of Dialogue draws lessons from a diversity of faith traditions to transform conflict, from identifying the root cause of anger to aligning with an energy beyond oneself—what Christians call grace—to the true listening practiced by Buddhist monks. Whether atheist or fundamentalist, Muslim or Jewish, Quaker or Hindu, any reader involved in difficult dialogue will find concrete steps towards a meeting of souls.

The Urban Street Stormwater Guide begins from the principle that street design can support—or degrade—the urban area’s overall environmental health. By incorporating Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) into the right-of-way, cities can manage stormwater and reap the public health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits of street trees, planters, and greenery in the public realm.

Building on the successful NACTO urban street guides, the Urban Street Stormwater Guide provides the best practices for the design of GSI along transportation corridors. The state-of-the-art solutions in this guide will assist urban planners and designers, transportation engineers, city officials, ecologists, public works officials, and others interested in the role of the built urban landscape in protecting the climate, water quality, and natural environment.

We rely on chemical cures to keep our bodies free from disease and our farms free from bugs and weeds. While human and agricultural health are rarely considered together, both are based on the same ecology, and both are being threatened by organisms that have evolved to resist our antibiotics and pesticides. Fortunately, scientists are finding new solutions that work with, rather than against, nature. There are viruses that bust apart bacteria; insect pheromones that throw crop-destroying moths into a misguided sexual frenzy; plant genes edited to protect against disease; and a resurgence of the ancient practice of fecal transplants. In this hopeful book, Monosson offers a fascinating look into the future of natural defenses.