How to Build a Village

Book: How to Build a Village. Claude Lewenz.

Description

"How to Build a Village is a handbook, a toolbox, and an opener to a larger conversation about how better to be in the world. Have 50 years of suburbs delivered on their promise? The book offers solutions to the problems facing modern suburbs through the design and construction of a different type of living arrangement; a Village founded on improving quality of life.

The Village differs from the suburban model of sprawling neighborhoods that necessitate a car to get to work and other amenities to describe human-scaled development, scaled at a friendly size for a human. Streets, buildings and the village grid are tailored to give those who live, work and play in and around them a feeling of intimacy, naturalness and safety. People remain the focus of the Village: they are its main resource and have priority. Emphasis is given to the construction of numerous plazas where people are able to gather, patterned on those in old Europe with cafe tables and local shops.

Significantly, if the Village is human-scaled then then it naturally becomes car-free. Streets designed for pedestrians are narrower; they follow the curve of the land and lead to places of interest. The focus becomes the journey as well as the destination." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007385.html) (http://www.villageforum.com)