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As environmental awareness grows around the world, people are learning that a diversity of species and the habitat to support them is necessary to maintain the ecological health of the earth. At the same time, however, the pressure to develop wildlife habitat for human settlement and economic gain also grows, causing frequent clashes between the forces of development and of conservation.

This pioneering study focuses on a new tool for resolving the land-use conflict—the creation of habitat conservation plans (HCPs). Timothy Beatley explores the development and early results of this provision of the United States' federal Endangered Species Act, which allows development of some habitat and a certain "take" of a protected species in return for the conservation of sufficient habitat to ensure its survival and long-term recovery.

Beatley looks specifically at nine HCPs in California, Nevada, Texas, and Florida, states where biological diversity and increasing populations have triggered many conflicts. Some of the HCPs include the San Bruno Mountain HCP near San Francisco, the North Key Largo HCP in the Florida Keys, the Clark County HCP near Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Balcones Canyonlands HCP near Austin, Texas. This first comprehensive overview of habitat conservation planning in the United States will be important reading for everyone involved in land-use debates.

In the early twentieth century, developers from Baltimore to Beverly Hills built garden suburbs, a new kind of residential community that incorporated curvilinear roads and landscape design as picturesque elements in a neighborhood. Intended as models for how American cities should be rationally, responsibly, and beautifully modernized, garden suburban communities were fragments of a larger (if largely imagined) garden city—the mythical “good” city of U.S. city-planning practices of the 1920s.

This extensively illustrated book chronicles the development of the two most fully realized garden suburbs in Texas, Dallas’s Highland Park and Houston’s River Oaks. Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson draws on a wealth of primary sources to trace the planning, design, financing, implementation, and long-term management of these suburbs. She analyzes homes built by such architects as H. B. Thomson, C. D. Hill, Fooshee & Cheek, John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Charles W. Oliver. She also addresses the evolution of the shopping center by looking at Highland Park’s Shopping Village, which was one of the first in the nation. Ferguson sets the story of Highland Park and River Oaks within the larger story of the development of garden suburban communities in Texas and across America to explain why these two communities achieved such prestige, maintained their property values, became the most successful in their cities in the twentieth century, and still serve as ideal models for suburban communities today.

Do cities work anymore? How did they get to be such sprawling conglomerations of lookalike subdivisions, megafreeways, and "big box" superstores surrounded by acres of parking lots? And why, most of all, don't they feel like real communities? These are the questions that Alex Marshall tackles in this hard-hitting, highly readable look at what makes cities work.

Marshall argues that urban life has broken down because of our basic ignorance of the real forces that shape cities—transportation systems, industry and business, and political decision making. He explores how these forces have built four very different urban environments—the decentralized sprawl of California's Silicon Valley, the crowded streets of New York City's Jackson Heights neighborhood, the controlled growth of Portland, Oregon, and the stage-set facades of Disney's planned community, Celebration, Florida.

To build better cities, Marshall asserts, we must understand and intelligently direct the forces that shape them. Without prescribing any one solution, he defines the key issues facing all concerned citizens who are trying to control urban sprawl and build real communities. His timely book will be important reading for a wide public and professional audience.

Maya architecture is often described as "massive" and "monumental," but experiments at Copan, Honduras, convinced Elliot Abrams that 300 people could have built one of the large palaces there in only 100 days.

In this groundbreaking work, Abrams explicates his theory of architectural energetics, which involves translating structures into volumes of raw and manufactured materials that are then multiplied by the time required for their production and assembly to determine the labor costs of past construction efforts. Applying this method to residential structures of the Late Classic period (A.D. 700-900) at Copan leads Abrams to posit a six-tiered hierarchic social structure of political decision making, ranging from a stratified elite to low-ranking commoners. By comparing the labor costs of construction and other economic activities, he also prompts a reconsideration of the effects of royal construction demands on commoners.

How the Maya Built Their World will interest a wide audience in New and Old World anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and engineering.