Queens Boulevard Before & After, Queens, New York.
Massengale & Co LLC and Urban Advantage, 2014. Visualization.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Book

Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns

HOBOKEN, N.J. (January 27, 2014) – John Wiley & Sons, Inc. announced today the publication of Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns by John Massengale and Victor Dover with foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales.

Massengale and Dover know how to fix America’s neighborhoods, cities, and towns: make them walkable again. That begins with great streets where people want to be, streets that are comfortable, safe, and interesting. In Street Design, two accomplished architects and urban designers share insights on how good street design can increase happiness, unlock economic value, improve our health and lower our carbon footprints.

Americans are demanding streets that serve the needs of their communities as well as their cars. In just five years over 600 jurisdictions have adopted “Complete Streets” policies, because we want beautiful streets where people have the option of getting out of their cars to bike and walk. This user-friendly street design book analyzes and illustrates hundreds of streets old and new, shows us what works and what doesn’t, and reveals the secrets behind designing beautiful streets and walkable places.

Street Design is the essential handbook for urban designers, civic leaders, architects, city planners, engineers, developers, landscape architects, and community activists: it is ideal reading for any person who wants to make their community walkable and create memorable streets that are not just routes to someplace else, but great places that are destinations in themselves.

This innovative and transformative guide:

• Offers instruction on how to design new streets and improve existing ones to create more walkable cities and towns
• Shows examples of over 150 excellent historic streets, retrofitted streets, and new streets, and explains why they are successful and how they were designed and created
• Highlights common street-design challenges and ways they can be addressed through placemaking
• Includes strategies for shaping space in the public right-of-way through correct building height to street width ratios, terminated vistas, landscaping, and street geometry
• Features more than 500 color and black-and-white photos and 32 pages of color plates
• Includes afterword by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere 
• Incorporates guest essays from 20 of the leading thinkers in the field, including Andrés Duany, Léon Krier, Ethan Kent, Kaid Benfield, and John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee.

Publish date: January 27, 2014

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

ISBN-10: 1118066707

ISBN-13: 978-1-118-06670-6

Price: $85.00

Pages: 448 pages

Images: 547, with 53 of those in color

Cover: Hardcover

Trim Size: 9.1 x 7.9 x 1.2 inches

Web sites: Wiley and www.streets-book.com/

E-Book ISBN: 978-1-118-41859-8, 416 pages, $59.99

About the authors:

John Montague Massengale, AIA, is an architect and urban designer in New York City. He is a board member of the CNU, which has been called “the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post–Cold War era” and a former Director of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. With Robert A. M. Stern, he was coauthor of New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890–1915 and The Anglo-American Suburb.

Victor Dover, FAICP, is cofounder of Dover, Kohl & Partners Town Planning based in Coral Gables, Fla., a design practice focused on restoring healthy neighborhoods as the basis for sound communities and regions. He is former national chair of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) and lead designer of more than 150 neighborhoods, urban revitalization programs, and regional plans across the United States and abroad.

Advance Praise for Street Design:

“We are going to start walking around the places we live again, and as that occurs and becomes normal, we will rapidly redevelop a demand for higher quality in building at the human scale.”
—From the Afterword by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere

“Street Design is a lucid, practical and altogether indispensable guide for envisioning and creating vibrant 21st century towns and cities. It should be required reading for every local political leader, planner, architect, real estate developer and engaged urban citizen in America.”
—Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 and author of True Believers  

“This book could change the way people see the streets in their towns and cities. And it could help those towns and cities make streets for people, rather than their cars.”
—Mayor Joe Riley, Charleston, South Carolina

Photo or interview requests, contact: Linda Stephen
Linda@iwprgroup.com
402-483-0747