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From Los Angeles to New York, the headlines from urban America proclaim riot, decline, and despair. This book is different. This book is about solutions: the Breakthroughs - the tentative, fragile, critical lead indicators that can serve as models for neighborhoods, communities, and cities looking toward the twenty-first century.
In vivid, colorful, often provocative prose, nationally syndicated authors Neal Peirce and Robert Guskind describe six innovative experiments in urban revitalization, winners of the Rudy Bruner Award for Excellence in the Urban Environment. The Bruner Award recognizes and rewards innovative projects that blend empowerment, diversity, and equity with effective design, social responsibility, and economic viability.
Authors Peirce and Guskind describe the premises underlying each project, the barriers that were overcome, and the substantial results that were achieved. They also tease out the vital lessons of what made these efforts work, lessons that stand as requirements for successful projects elsewhere: openness to innovation; decentralized decision-making; broad-based participation; empowerment of locally driven solutions. In commentaries at the end of each chapter, members of the judges panel describe the thinking behind their selection of these projects as exemplars of urban innovation.
This is essential reading for students, policy-makers, planners, and all those seeking a glimpse of a future in which we can take pride in being Americans.
