Better Not Bigger: How to Take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community

Contrary to accepted wisdom, rapid urban growth can leave communities permanently scarred, deeply in debt, with unaffordable housing, a lost sense of community, and sacrificed environmental quality.

In Better NOT Bigger, Fodor explodes the fundamental myth that growth is good for us and that more development will bring in more tax money, add jobs, lower housing costs, and reduce property taxes. Lively and well-illustrated, Better NOT Bigger provides insights, ideas, and tools to empower citizens to switch off their local "growth machine" by debunking the pro-growth rhetoric. Highly accessible to ordinary citizens as well as professional planners.

Better NOT Bigger has been made available through New Catalyst Books. New Catalyst Books is an imprint of New Society Publishers, aimed at providing readers with access to a wider range of books dealing with sustainability issues by bringing books back into print that have enduring value in the field. For more information on New Catalyst Books click here.

Eben V. Fodor is a professional community planning consultant, and an environmentalist, civic activist, and grassroots organizer from Eugene, Oregon. He has been in the middle of the urban growth controversy for the past ten years.