Across the United States, issues such as sustainability, smart growth, and livable communities are making headlines. Planning for a New Century brings together leading thinkers in the fields of planning, urban design, education, welfare, and housing to examine those issues and to consider the ways in which public policies have helped create—and can help solve—many of the problems facing our communities.

Each chapter identifies issues, provides background, and offers specific policy suggestions for federal, state, and local initiatives. Topics examined include:

• the relation of existing growth management policies to social equity, as well as how regional growth management measures can make new development more sustainable
• how an obscure technical procedure in highway design becomes a de facto regional plan
• ways in which local governments can promote environmental preservation and better-designed communities by rewriting local zoning and subdivision ordinances
• why alleviating housing shortages and slum conditions has resulted in a lack of affordable housing, and how that problem can be solved
• how business improvement districts can make downtowns cleaner, safer, and more welcoming to workers and visitors

In addition, the book features chapters on public safety, education, and welfare reform that include proposals that will help make regional growth management easier as inner-city crime is reduced, schools are improved, and concentrations of extreme poverty are eliminated.

Planning for the New Century brings together current academic research with pressing public policy concerns, and will be a useful resource for policymakers at all levels of government, for planners and architects, and for students and scholars of urban planning and design, and urban studies.

Jonathan Barnett is professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, an urban design consultant to many cities and suburbs, and author of The Fractured Metropolis (Harper Collins, 1996).