THE CHALLENGE: Invent a town to solve all suburban problems, meet challenges like Jane Jacobs described; plus comprehensively solve all livability, environmental, & affordability issues. Impossible? In this book, key historical influences are reviewed w/ fresh perspectives on current ideas. Entirely new town & home designs are presented. Permanent infrastructure systems can save 50% of home cost & add livability. Three-dimensional home site arrangements save costs & offer more privacy, freedom, & flexibility than in suburbia; neighborly potentials are enhanced. While at same as suburban densities, 70% of the same amount of land becomes an integral open space & farming system. The Home Site, Near & Extended Neighborhood w/ Main Street acts as a visual & functional unit for all life's moments, & is designed primarily for each individual's satisfaction. WHY INVENT A NEW TOWN CONCEPT? Few towns have been primarily for people. Town plans based on cars make cars necessary. There's no incentive for high quality long-term investment in towns with short-term 25 to 50 year plans, w/ no truly long-term comprehensive strategy. Current concepts can't solve all the problems. They will never solve the basic conflicts between housing eventually needing more land, the environmentalist, landowners, & developers. Everyone's trapped; the concept is the problem. Affordability, livability, & sustainability will be more difficult. General Plans that dictate existing design solutions/are based on cars stifle any truly new ideas. To solve current & future challenges requires entirely new concepts. With insight from the past & today's technology, we can design human habitats to function as an integral part of the surrounding natural environment. This new-concept town approaches the efficiency & natural balance common in homes built by many other less intelligent life forms. This new concept is functionally, structurally & financially feasible today. www.sprawlsolutions.com

This highly readable account of the ecological psychology movement makes its general ideas accessible to the beginning student and non-specialist. It describes the work of Roger Barker in the 'behaviour settings' of small American and English towns and the formulation of 'manning theory,' which concerns the number of people needed to 'operate and maintain' a particular setting. The author concludes by suggesting implications for everyday life and proposing different directions for ecological psychology.