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Review: Water Centric Sustainable Communities: Planning, Retrofitting and Building the Next Urban Environment and The Water Environment of Cities

uses along the streetscape, personalizing the street front to make it much more penetrable and therefore interesting to pedestrians, passers-by, or casual observers to encourage gathering and increased use of the public space. By promoting the greater use of the space by both customers and noncustomers of businesses on the streets, the street allows for ownership and maintenance by the public as well as the private businesses. The book contributes to the existing scholarship about public space and streets. It is a good text for urban design graduate students and also for practicing community planners. Overall, the book is very easy to read. It is a wellresearched case study of three main streets in the Boston metropolitan area that sheds light on some of the problems facing our public social spaces. However, the book falters a bit in collecting information from the field and transferring it to the broader framework of open spaces in the entire nation as well as globally. The street sections are all from the same region and provide insight into the behavior of the people living there. People’s perceptions and behaviors vary widely across geography, and it is unclear how the results or insights gained from this study could be applicable to other areas. The absence of cost considerations for designing and maintaining such public spaces is another drawback, since many good plans are abandoned because of lack of available funding. Cost being such an important factor in decision-making processes, its omission seems to be unfortunate and makes the study incomplete. Also, the underlying assumption of the author “if we build it, they will come” may not hold true in this day and age. With increasing influence of technology and online shopping experiences, it remains to be seen whether good design is good enough for breathing life into contemporary social space. But, as the author rightly notes, public space needs to provide not just the products but also services and experiences that could make these spaces places of interest and interaction.