The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Placemaking

By Jay Walljasper

New Society Publishers, 2007, 192 pp., $19.95 paperback.

This book, written by Jay Walljasper for the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces, is intended to inspire neighborhood activists to fix up, reclaim, or improve the places where they live. It’s chock-full of suggestions that individuals or small groups can act on without much difficulty: Plant some petunias in a public place, install a bench along a sidewalk, start a local electronic mailing list, turn a vacant lot into a community garden, decorate an intersection, make a place comfortable for dog-walking, greet everyone with a smile.

It’s a Mr. Rogers beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood kind of book. I suppose it will appeal to citizens who need to be encouraged to initiate modest actions aimed at making daily life more friendly. Myself, I’d rather not wear a tag saying “Hello, my name is…” when I go to the grocery store or the coffee shop — though Walljasper says that if everyone did this, it would spark rewarding connections. I’m also not sure I’d want to encourage my neighbors to install six-foot-high plastic Easter bunnies on their front lawns — though Walljasper says “striking visual elements” like these will “cause cars to slow down.” In the right settings, with the right people, tactics of those sorts might produce a community benefit.

The element of urban design that Walljasper discusses most extensively is traffic-calming. He argues for replacing many traffic signals with four-way stop signs. “According to the Federal Highway Administration, all-way stop intersections [usually 4-way stop signs] have the best safety record, with half as many accidents as those controlled by two-way stops or signals,” he reports. Drivers tend to respond to four-way stop signs as if they were yield signs, he says. That, he notes, is sufficient to slow the traffic and make pedestrians safer.

Many of the topics in The Great Neighborhood Book are presented in compact, two- or three-page chunks, so a lot of complexities remain unexplored. The author doesn’t say how large and dense an urban area can function with one four-way stop after another. To his credit, however, Walljasper provides numerous references — names, organizations, e-mail addresses, and websites that readers can use to gain additional information. The book contains examples of tactics and strategies, such as pedestrian-oriented circulation networks, from all over the world. With any luck, readers will quickly progress beyond planting petunias.