The Freedoms of Suburbia

In the recent year or two I've been reading dozens of books about urban planning, suburbia, traditional neighbourhoods, modern neighbourhoods, traffic planning, pedestrian planning, cityscape and from there I'm slowly moving now especially to the roots of modernism and its various derivatives in architecture and city planning. There are lots of books about the former, with a huge number of various angles. Dom Nozzi has a couple of books with critical analysis on traffic planning and suburbia; well, he's not against all that per se, he just carefully points out the planning patterns that do not work for humane living. Then everybody probably knows Kunstler who has been a vocal author on the subject for years; I can recommend his TedTalk[1] to sum up many of his books. On the contrary, a delightful book about the appeal and history of the British suburbia by Paul Barker is the book 'The Freedoms of Suburbia', to be enjoyed slowly over the cup of hot tea. [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu... (http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html)