Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns

A comprehensive blueprint for fixing America’s cities and towns, updated and expanded

“This book should be required reading in schools of urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture, and an understanding of it should be part of the licensing requirements for civil, traffic, and transportation engineers.”
—ELIZABETH PLATER-ZYBERK, DPZ coDESIGN, former Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Miami

“I am delighted by the eloquence, knowledge, thoroughness, and basic common sense of Street Design, which is at once a how-to book and an ode to the beauty and wonder of cities. Much more than a formula for how to design streets, this book helps us understand that there are no simple answers or all-purpose solutions to the challenge of city-building.”
—PAUL GOLDBERGER, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair, formerly at the New Yorker and the New York Times

John Massengale and Victor Dover know how to fix America’s neighborhoods, cities, and towns: make them walkable again. That begins with great streets where people want to be, streets that are comfortable, safe, interesting, and beautiful. Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, Second Edition looks at hundreds of streets old and new, shows us what works and what doesn’t, and reveals the secrets behind designing great streets and walkable places.

Revised and expanded, now with full-color images throughout, this indispensable and transformative guide, the only book of its kind:

• Shows examples of over 150 excellent streets and explains why they are successful and how they were designed and created
• Presents interactive, three-dimensional models of the ten essential street types at https://www.street.design/models
• Reveals crucial elements that many modern street designs lack
• Offers step-by-step instruction on how to design new streets and improve existing ones to create more walkable cities and towns
• Highlights common street-design challenges and ways they can be addressed through placemaking
• Features more than 700 color and black-and-white images
• Includes contributions from twenty of the leading design experts in the field, including Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Léon Krier, Nicholas Boys Smith, Jeff Speck, Stefanos Polyzoides, and John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee

Street Design, Second Edition is the indispensable handbook for urban designers, civic leaders, architects, city planners, engineers, and landscape architects, and essential reading for any person who wants to make their community walkable and create memorable streets that are not mere routes to someplace else, but the great places to which other routes lead.