What Can Northern Europe Teach Us About Building Livable Communities?

"An increasing number of community policy makers, planners and residents around the world want their communities —neighborhoods, villages, towns and cities— to be more liveable. Liveable communities provide residents with opportunities to enjoy a high quality of life by preserving or improving the quality of their environment, enabling them to live in a variety of housing options, and by making it possible for them to walk, bike or take public transportation to go to the places they most frequently need to go every day, such as work, schools, grocery stores, shopping malls, parks, recreational areas and health facilities."

With these goals in mind, Rodriguez surveys, "innovations in community planning and development in Germany and Scandinavia, identifies some of the underlying principles for the success of these innovations, and shows that communities can be planned, designed, developed and managed so that they can be made increasingly more liveable."