In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how cities with well-designed density can result in a higher quality of life. He presents ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions.
 
Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance in a highly visual package, for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.
 

In My Kind of City, Dittmar has organized his selected writings into ten sections with original introductions. His observations range on scale from local (“My Favorite Street: Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London”) to national (“Post Truth Architecture in the Age of Trump”) and global (“Architects are Critical to Adapting our Cities to Climate Change”). Andrés Duany writes of Hank in the book foreword, “He has continued to search for ways to engage place, community and history in order to avoid the tempting formalism of plans.”
 
The range of topics covered in My Kind of City reflects the breadth of Dittmar’s experience in working for better cities for people. Common themes emerge in the engaging prose including Dittmar’s belief that improving our cities should not be left to the “experts”; his appreciation for the beautiful and the messy; and his rare combination of deep expertise and modesty. As Lynn Richards, CEO of Congress for the New Urbanism expresses in the preface, “Hank’s writing is smart without being elitist, witty and poetic, succinct and often surprising.”
 
My Kind of City captures a visionary planner’s spirit, eye for beauty, and love for the places where we live.
 

Climate Action Planning is designed to help professionals working at local levels to develop and implement plans to mitigate a community's greenhouse gas emissions and increase the resilience of communities against climate change impacts. This fully revised and expanded edition goes well beyond climate action plans to examine the mix of policy and planning instruments available to every community.
 
Climate Action Planning is the most comprehensive book on the state of the art, science, and practice of local climate action planning. It should be a first stop for any local government interested in addressing climate change.
 

Like 75% of American women, Ronnie Citron-Fink colored her hair. Yet as an environmental journalist, she knew all those unpronounceable chemical names on the back of the hair dye box were far from safe.

So Ronnie decided to ditch the dye and go in search of answers. What are the risks of hair dye? Are there safer alternatives? Will I still feel like me when I have gray hair?

True Roots follows her journey from dark dyes to a silver crown of glory, from fear of aging to embracing natural beauty. Along the way, women of all ages can learn to protect themselves from dangerous products and discover a new hair story—one built on individuality, health, and truth.
 

In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns.

This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.

Vacant lots, so often seen as neighborhood blight, have the potential to be a key element of community revitalization. Sandra Albro offers practical insights through her experience leading the five-year Vacant to Vibrant project, which piloted the creation of green infrastructure networks in Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; and Buffalo, New York. Vacant to Vibrant provides a point of comparison among the three cities as they adapt old systems to new, green technology. Albro offers insights from every step of the Vacant to Vibrant project, including planning, design, community engagement, implementation, and maintenance successes and challenges of creating a green infrastructure network from vacant lots in neighborhoods.

Landscape architects and other professionals whose work involves urban greening will learn new approaches for creating infrastructure networks and facilitating more equitable access to green space.
 

Wildlife species across the globe face a dire predicament as their traditional migratory routes are cut off by human encroachment and they are forced into smaller and smaller patches of habitat. As key species populations dwindle, ecosystems lose resilience and face collapse, and along with them, the ecosystem services we depend on. Healthy ecosystems need healthy wildlife populations. One possible answer? Wildlife corridors that connect fragmented landscapes.

This second edition of Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation captures advances in the field over the past ten years. It features a new chapter on marine corridors and the effects of climate change on habitat, as well as a discussion of corridors in the air for migrating flying species. Practitioners, land managers, and scholars of ecology will find it an indispensable resource.

We should thank a pollinator at every meal. These diminutive creatures fertilize a third of the crops we eat. Yet half of the 200,000 species of pollinators are threatened. Birds, bats, insects, and many other pollinators are disappearing, putting our entire food supply in jeopardy.

Protecting Pollinators breaks down the latest science on environmental threats and takes readers inside the most promising conservation efforts. Efforts range from cities creating butterfly highways to citizen scientists monitoring migration.  

Along with inspiring stories of revival and lessons from failed projects, readers will find practical tips to get involved. And they will be reminded of the magic of pollinators—the iconic monarchs, dainty hummingbirds, and homely bats alike who bring food to our tables.
 

Holistic management is a systems-thinking approach developed by biologist Allan Savory to restore the world’s grassland soils and minimize the damaging effects of climate change and desertification on humans and the natural world. This third edition of Holistic Management Handbook: Regenerating Your Land and Growing Your Profits is the long-awaited companion volume to Holistic Management, Savory’s classic textbook. It is the key to helping you restore health to your land and ensure a stable, sustainable livelihood from its bounty.

This new edition, thoroughly revised, updated, and streamlined offers step-by-step instructions for running a ranch or farm using a holistic management approach. Ranchers, farmers, and anyone working to address global environmental degradation will find this comprehensive handbook an indispensable guide to putting the holistic management concept into action with tangible results.
 

When it comes to food, Americans seem to have a pretty great deal. Our grocery stores are overflowing with countless varieties of convenient products. But like most bargains that are too good to be true, the modern food system relies on an illusion. It depends on endless abundance, but the planet has its limits.

Through beautifully-told stories from around the world, Kevin Walker reveals the unintended consequences of our myopic focus on quantity over quality. By the end of the journey, we not only understand how the drive to produce ever more food became hardwired into the American psyche, but why shifting our mindset is essential.