Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (The City in the Twenty-First Century)
Named one ofPlanetizen's Top 10 Books for 2013"A great read, a valuable contribution to current planning discourses on shrinking cities. This is a book that will be noticed not only in the United States but also abroad."—Journal of the American Planning Association"Brent D. Ryan has produced a well-written and well-researched narrative about the development of many older American cities. Especially, the case studies about Detroit and Philadelphia are as interesting to read as they are well documented."—Journal of Housing and the Built Environment"Design After Declineis an important addition to the study of urbanism 'after the fall.' Ryan brings to this surprisingly little-researched topic an impressive expertise in planning as well as a belief in the social impact of good urban design. As he shows, the many failures and few hard-won victories of late twentieth-century urbanism must be understood if we are to recover a genuine American urbanism in the course of the twenty-first century."—Robert Fishman, University of Michigan