Ecologies & Placemaking
(In order of publication)
ArtMill: A Story of Sustainable Creativity in Bohemia
Barbara Benish tells her story as a female artist who found a way to build a life in a rural, post-totalitarian, foreign country, it is a testament to the resilience of the people of that small nation that was sacrificed in the tumultuous chess game of colonial superpowers dividing up Europe after the devastation of WWII.
Creative Instigation: The Art & Strategy of Authentic Community Engagement
By: Fern Tiger
Creative Instigation is a collection of in-depth case stories focused on effective and innovative community engagement and policymaking in diverse cities across the western U.S.
I Opened the Gate Laughing: An Inner Journey — 20th Anniversary Edition
By Mayumi Oda
A tribute to the power of spiritual practice, creative expression, and true self-acceptance I Opened the Gate Laughing is the story of one woman’s journey to creative freedom through gardening and the teachings of Zen. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.
Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House
The roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house up to its newest form. Settlement house workers have helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars.
Zoned Out! Race Displacement, and City Planning in New York City, (Revised Edition)
Edited by Tom Angotti and Sylvia Morse
Zoned Out! shows how gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color have occurred in Williamsburg, Harlem and Chinatown, neighborhoods facing massive displacement of people of color, and looks at ways the city can address inequalities, promote authentic community-based planning and develop housing in the public domain.
Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth
This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series, is a collection of environmental and climate activists whose stunning color portraits Robert Shetterly painted with the intention of honoring their work and bringing them to a wider audience.
Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind
They lived the dream of Manifest Destiny; their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations. Dunlap looks back into California’s and America’s history for the key to their silences and a way to heal the wounds of the land, its original people, and the harmful mind of the colonizer.
We Built a Village: Cohousing and the Commons
By Diane Rothbard Margolis, Foreword by David Bollier
We Built a Village is both a memoir and a sociological analysis that describes the process of planning and building an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid 1990s, setting in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together.
Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea
By Aviva Rahmani, Foreword by Lucy Lippard
Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Rahmani, offering her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Rahmani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.
Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities
Edited by Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, Chris Fermantle, and Aviva Rahmani
Compiled of 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, EcoArt in Action stands as a field guide for practical solutions to critical environmental challenges. Each contribution provides models for ecoart practice that are adaptable for use within a variety of classrooms, communities, and contexts.
Click here to see our Ecoart in Action contributors!
How Spaces Become Places: Place Makers Tell Their Stories
How Spaces Become Places feature stories of community members acting together to transform edgy, empty, contested, or unsafe spaces into functional, safe, convivial places. Pragmatic, real life accounts offer edifying and instructive examples of the kinds of work a variety of readers can do within their own communities.
Jane Jacobs’s First City: Learning from Scranton, Pennsylvania
By Glenna Lang
A brilliant work of scholarship that convincingly shows how Jane Jacobs’s canonical work on urbanism and the life of great cities, her work on city and national economies, and her underlying social and ethical foundations developed in the historic, mid-sized city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This intriguing question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture of Main Streets: the ways that Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a marker for the integrity of civilization—and the marks aren’t always good.
Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices for Planning Sustainable Communities
By Victoria Derr, Louise Chawla, and Mara Mintzer
An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and teens in the process of urban design.
The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race
Carl Anthony interweaves urban history, racial justice, and cosmology with personal experiences as an architect/planner, environmentalist, and Black American. By connecting the struggles for social and racial justice to the universe, it creates a new story for our time.
Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
Foreword by Carlos F. Peterson and Mary Travis Bassett
Root Shock examines three different US cities to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite.
Growing A Life: Teen Gardeners Harvest Food, Health, and Joy
By Illéne Pevec, PhD
A testament to the influential nature of educational and community gardening programs for teens.
Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory Planning and Community Building
By Roger Katan with Ronald Shiffman
Case studies of neighborhood developments from North and South America, Europe, and Africa that span more than forty years. This book offers a seminal treatise on the community based design practices of participatory planning an advocacy architecture.
From Foreclosure to Fair Lending: Advocacy, Organizing, Occupy, and the Pursuit of Equitable Credit
Edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires
This book informs a renewed movement for fair lending and fair housing. Leading advocates and specialists examine strategic initiatives to realize objectives of the federal Fair Housing Act as well as state and local laws.
Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
An identification of the problems of socially, economically, and racially divided neighborhoods and nine tools that can mend them.
Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space
Edited by Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, Lynne Elizabeth and Ronald Shiffman
In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leading planners and social scientists examine public space today and freedom of assembly.
Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation
Case Studies from North America, Scandinavia, Japan, and Great Britain demonstrate natural outdoor teaching environments that support hand-on learning in science, math, language, and art in ways that nurture healthy imagination and socialization.
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs
Edited by Stephen Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth
A timely revisitation of renowned urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs’ lifework, What We See invites thirty pundits and practitioners across fields to refresh Jacobs’ economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. Combining personal and professional observations with meditations on Jacobs’ insights, essayists bring their diverse experience to bear to sketch the blueprints for the living city.
Building Commons and Community
By Karl Linn
Building Commons and Community documents 45 years of the late Karl Linn’s legacy creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. In this richly-illustrated landscape-format hardcover book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom.