Repairing the American Metropolis

"The reader's urban experience will never be quite the same after experiencing this book. With clarity, precision, and deft detail, Kelbaugh pans the unsustainable design strategies and conceits of an auto-crazed culture, as our human spirit vanishes in the rearview mirror. The author is uniquely well qualified to connect the dots between the habitat we could fashion and the humanity we could reclaim."

"An academic's thoughtful meditation on values that should underlie development—community, sustainable order, and human spirit—and a discerning examination of the proposed remedies."

"Kelbaugh describes architects' and urban planners' responses to the problems of 20th-century urbanism and reviews the predicament of modern suburbanization, offering a cognent critique of both modernist and postmodernist paradigms. In contrast to architectural historians who do similar work, however, Kelbaugh also suggests solutions to the spatial problems he documents."

"At once a primer on how architecture, urban design, and metropolitan planning can be pursued in a key that resonates with sustainability and wise stewardship of the environment and a compelling polemic on why such thinking will produce better places to pursue our livelihoods and live out our lives."

"Repairing the American Metropolis is written with such exquisite clarity and confidence, it is easy to overlook that Doug Kelbaugh is arguing for nothing less than a fundamental reconsideration of contemporary American architecture and planning."

"This is the most sophisticated critical presentation of the New Urbanism to be found anywhere."