The Smart Growth Manual: An Interview with author Mike Lydon

My copy of the Smart Growth Manual arrives today. If it's even half as good as Suburban Nation, it'll soon be bristling with post-it notes.

Mike Lydon, co-author of the new Smart Growth Manual, is a member of the Next American Vanguard, a group of 34 young advocates, planners and policymakers representing America’s next generation of urban leaders. He formerly worked at the planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company alongside Andres Duany, who wrote Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream along with Jeff Speck, another prolific planner and urban designer. Lydon helped the two write and edit The Smart Growth Manual, a “companion volume” to Suburban Nation that seeks to thoroughly define “smart growth” and provide advice and best-practice examples of how to translate the idea into urban reality. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has called the book an “indispensable guide to city planning,” and the website Planetizen recently named it as one of the 10 best planning, design and development books of the year. Here, Lydon tells NAC about working on the book.

Tell us a bit about the history of the project.

The Smart Growth Manual was originally conceived as the follow-up to the highly successful Suburban Nation, written by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, published in 2000. Jeff set out to write the The Smart Growth Manual as a user-friendly guide to combating the problem of suburban sprawl so clearly identified in Suburban Nation. Jeff, who was still the Director of Town Planning for DPZ at the time, took a sabbatical to write the first draft. As Jeff tells it, Andres read the draft but felt that there was just too much changing in the planning field for the book to move forward; too many smart growth projects just coming out of the ground; too many new policies whose outcomes could not yet be measured; and too many related movements—such as green building, global warming/environmental groups, public health advocates, smart growth, New Urbanism, etc.—that had not yet achieved the traction that they have today. So they decided to hold off on the project and observe, while also continuing to refine and advance their own work.

Read the rest at NAC Daily Report: The Smart Growth Manual: An Interview with Mike Lydon