The heavy hardcover arrived by mail: the title "Street Design, the Secret to Great Cities and Towns" contains a tall promise. The two authors, Victor Dover, a planner, and John Massengale, an urban designer are said to have worked for three years on the 400 page compilation of examples from around the world to prove that good streets, indeed, make great cities.
With a foreword by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, and a afterword by Howard Kunstler, a heavy dose of New Urbanism is guaranteed to hide between the covers. I had to read the book for a radio conversation with the author, a former chair of the
Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) and principal of
Dover, Kohl & Partners, an international planning and urban design consulting firm located in Florida. Usually I would eagerly delve into a new book but in this case, because of my mixed feelings about New Urbanism, I felt I already knew what I would find. Also, prominently on my bookshelf sits "Great Streets", Allan Jacobs seminal large format book, which I have consulted for 20 years or so for its wonderful "
figure- grounds" depicted in a consistent scale for an easy comparison between cities. The Boston Globe wrote this about the Berkeley professor's book, published in 1993 by MIT:
"Jacobs has been working on this classic-there's no other word for it-for a decade. Jacobs rightly believes that good cities are made of good streets and that we're rapidly losing our talent for creating them."
What could Dover possibly add, I wondered. Setting the book aside I resorted to listening online to a recent lecture Dover had given about his book.