A Legal Guide to Urban and Sustainable Development
Edited By Daniel K. Slone and Doris S. Goldstein
ISBN: 978-0-470-05329-4; 352 pages; John Wiley & Sons $75.00 Sept. 2008

As urbanism and sustainability have emerged as leading urban planning and design concepts, legal concepts and laws often have failed to keep pace. This book is a primer for practicing architects, urban designers and planners on legal and contractual issues related to sustainable urban design and development that do not conform to conventional planning and zoning.

“There is hardly anything more complicated to create than a real community,” says Andres Duany, cofounder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, in the book’s forward. “Something besides the current technique must be required to make a community fly.” Duany says that what the authors offer is the “know-how” of delivering viable communities developed through their “observation, apprenticeship and practice.”

“For this book, we draw largely on our own experience. We have had the good fortune to work with and support the architects, planners city officials and developers who have led the shift in the way urban planning is conceived,” say the two main authors, Daniel K. Slone and Doris S. Goldstein. “The book offers practical solutions to the problems developers planners, citizen groups community leaders and their lawyers are facing as they embrace urbanism and sustainability as a new and simultaneously old way of looking at urban planning.”

Slone was a charter member of of the Congress for the New Urbanism and has served as its national counsel since its formation. He also served as counsel for the U.S. Green Building Council for many years.

Goldstein is an attorney who has represented dozens of New Urbanist communities, beginning with Seaside, Fla., in the 1980s.