It's a Sprawl World After All

By Douglas E. Morris

Suburbia has twisted the American dream into a nightmare. The US now has the most rapes, assaults, murders and serial killings per capita, by a wide margin, than any other first-world nation. It's a Sprawl World After All is the first book to link America's increase in violence and the corresponding breakdown in society with the post WWII development of suburban sprawl.
Without small towns to bring people together, the unplanned growth of sprawl has left Americans isolated, alienated and afraid of the strangers that surround them. Suburbia has substituted cars for conversation, malls for main streets, and the artificial community of television for authentic social interaction. This has resulted in dramatically negative impacts on US society, including: the transformation of America's community-oriented small-town sensibilities into an isolated society of strangers burdened by isolation, loneliness and depression the emergence of a culture of incivility characterized by extreme individualism and a callous disregard for others, and levels of violence so rampant as to be proclaimed "epidemic" by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Advocating that urgent attention be paid to managing development by emulating the smart growth examples of European cities, the book's final section offers readers tools to rebuild community in their lives as well as in society at large. It offers practical solutions that can improve everyone's quality of life.Provocative and thoughtful, It's A Sprawl World After All also includes a helpful resource listing of organizations committed to making communities more sustainable.

An Archaeology of Socialism

By Victor Buchli

This fascinating case study of Moisei Ginzburg’s Constructivist masterpiece the Narkomfin Communal House demonstrates how the architect sought to embody Socialist and feminist principles in the form and fabric of the building. In this way an iconic early Communist project functions as a metaphor for the overwhelming optimism and uncompromising espousal of newness in early Communist thought, just as the subsequent behaviour of the building’s inhabitants as they adapted, compromised with and resisted it, is a metaphor for the adaptations and compromises of Communist ideology in the following decades.

[Review from London Review of Books]

The Gardens and Parks at Hampton Court Palace

By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

HAMPTON COURT PALACE is famed throughout the world and regularly draws over a million visitors each year. Host to garden shows and spectacular concerts, it is a major tourist attraction, a must-see on every overseas visitor's itinerary and the subject of many school visits and weekend outings. With its stunning buildings, vistas and gardens, it is a haven for those seeking peace from the busy London streets that surround it; a place to wander in the footsteps of its many royal visitors over the centuries and to marvel at the fact that a building that originated in 1086 has survived, albeit with many changes, to the present day.Known as a royal palace, it was actually only host to the royal family themselves for about two centuries, after which it became a place of rest for aging courtiers and grace-and-favour inhabitants and this change of use is reflected in the surrounding 2000 acres of gardens and woods. The keen horticulturalist Cardinal Wolsey was the first to stamp his personality on the grounds with the development of knot gardens, fishponds and a privy orchard during the early 1500s. Successive occupants embellished his initial ideas with the addition of the infamous maze, the tennis courts, even the formation of its own river, the Longford, which remains to this day.This fascinating tour of the parks and gardens is written by the Gardens Advisor to Hampton Court Palace and Vice-President of the London Historic Parks & Gardens Trust, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. A veritable champion of the site, he gives a highly readable, informative account of its development over the years, accompanied by the stunning photographs of Vivian Russell. Archive material mingles with current shots of the palace and its grounds, highlighting the changes that have occurred during the palace's turbulent history. With its vast redesign and renovations over the last few decades, the gardens now reflect the regality of the buildings they surround and this book makes an apt celebration of all the hard work that so many gardeners at the palace have undertaken. More than a souvenir book, it is a heritage work that every visitor - or would-be visitor - should own.