Your Car Free 2001 Bookshop

City Perspectives

Detour Publications

Carfree Cities
J. H. Crawford
International Books, 2000

Imagine life in a city free from the noise, stench, and danger of cars and trucks. Imagine that all basic needs, from groceries to child care, lie within a five-minute walk of every doorstep. Imagine that no commute takes more than 35 minutes from door to door, and that service is provided by a fast, cheap, safe, comfortable public transport system. This is the future that J.H. Crawford envisions in Carfree Cities.

Crawford argues unapologetically that the car is a technology that has run wild, and that the time has come to reclaim city streets for human activities. He proposes a city planned to maximize the quality of life for individuals and communities, and gives practical suggestions for implementing this basic design in both new and existing cities. By rejecting the assumption that continued car use in cities is inevitable, Crawford takes us a step closer to the tantalizing possibility of a return to the pattern of lively, attractive streets that we had enjoyed for thousands of years, until the advent of automobiles.

Hardcover, 324 pages, 60 drawings, 170 photographs / $49.95 CDN, $29.95 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]


Back to top

Detour Publications

City Comforts:
How to Build an Urban Village
 David Sucher
City Comforts Press, 1995

A highly visual, easy to understand tool for building liveable neighbourhoods.

Sucher's book stands above much urban ecology literature because of its straightforward, concise and witty approach. He cuts through technical language to offers great ideas in an accessible form - an example is his advice to "use small work to describe the landscape."

Says New Urbanism author Peter Katz, "City Comforts reminds one that there are literally hundred of little things - both functional and beautiful - that makes a successful urban place. The book's attention to detail stands in contrast to the kind of 'silver bullet' thinking that has wrought so much destruction and failure."

$25.50 CDN, $18.00 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]

Back to top

Detour Publications

Design With Nature
Ian L. McHarg
John Wiley & Sons, 1995

In the twenty-five years since it first took the academic world by storm, Design With Nature has done much to redefine the fields of landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecological design. It has also left a permanent mark on the ongoing discussion of mankind's place in nature and nature's place in mankind within the physical sciences and humanities. Described by one enthusiastic reviewer as a "user's manual for our world," Design With Nature offers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationship between the built environment and nature. In so doing, it provides nothing less than the scientific, technical, and philosophical foundations for a mature civilization that will, as Lewis Mumford ecstatically put it in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, "replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating and disappearing before our eyes."

208 Pages / $69.95 CDN, $49.95 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]


Back to top


Detour Publications

Eco-City Dimensions:
Perspectives on Sustainable Communities
 Mark Roseland, ed.
New Society, 1996

Many of our most critical global environmental concerns are rooted at the local level, so it follows that local communities may offer the brightest promise for solving many pressing world-scale problems. Eco-City Dimensions examines this crucial role that cities play in planetary health.

224 Pages with 20 Illustrations / $18.95 CDN, $14.95 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]

Back to top

Detour Publications

Ecological Design
Sim Van Der Ryn & Stuart Cohen
Island Press, 1995

Ecological Design presents a vision of how the living world and the human world can be rejoined by taking ecology as the basis for design--adapting and integrating human design with natural processes. The authors weave together case studies, personal anecdotes, images and theory to provide a thorough treatment of the concept of ecological design

200 Pages / Tables, figures, index / $32.95 CDN, $21.95 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]


Back to top


Detour Publications

Edge City:
Life on the New Frontier
 Joel Garreau
Anchor, 1992

Defines, anatomizes and - some would say - fetishizes the "new downtowns" that have sprung up on the outskirts of traditional North American cities. From Meadowlands, New Jersey, to Silicon Valley, California, to Mississauga, Ontario - edge cities are here to stay, and Garreau is their guru. A problematic book, but required reading for the well-rounded urbanist.

548 Pages / $25.95 CDN, $17.95 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback] Back to top


Detour Publications

Green Cities
 David Gordon
Black Rose Books

This anthology presents visions from around the world of an ecological urban model. It is a much needed prescription for the reformation of urban design and the reaffirmation of collective social goals.

299 Pages / $19.99 CDN, $14.99 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]


Back to top

Detour Publications


The Nature of Economies
Jane Jacobs
Random House, 2000

In The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, turns her attention to the similar rules and principles that govern economies and nature. The Nature of Economies is written in dialogue form: five intelligent friends discussing over coffee how economies work, and how systems found in nature can offer insight into economic development. The underlying question is both simple and profound, and the result is a wonderfully provocative, truly groundbreaking work by one of the great thinkers of our time.

$29.95 CDN / $18.95 US

[Add to Cart] [Checkout] [Currency Exchange] [Give Feedback]


Back to top

Home @Forum Send E-mail
Last updated 2 March 2001. © 1994-2001 EcoPlan , Paris.
Best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0 or better.
Site Map    What's New    Search