The Art of Classic Planning

“Buras seems to have been everywhere, and draws on examples from all of these places in demonstrating sound planning from the Maidan in Isfahan in Iran, to Andrassy Avenue in Budapest, to Jai Singh’s plan of Jaipur, to Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. He dedicates significant attention to centuries of planning concepts of every sort of variety… It is a deeply impressive and erudite contextualization of a massive range of material.”—Anthony Paletta, The American Conservative

“Buras’ highly intelligent and comprehensively illustrated blockbuster of a book is packed with celebrations of what make beautiful, successful, agreeable environments that people can actually enjoy (and which actually work)… [A] great book.”—James Stevens Curl, Times Higher Education

“Buras unpacks for the reader the embedded wisdom of the previous 5,000 years of city building that carries many a legacy of beautiful places created to meet the aspirations of their community… Clearly outlines the faulty thinking that led to the defacing and abandonment of our cities… Not merely a ‘must have’ book for the old library, it is a once in a generation treatise that contains within its pages the power to heal the world.”—Patrick Webb, Traditional Building

“This is truly the mother of all urban planning books.”—Léon Krier, author of The Architecture of Community

“A much-needed and heroic corrective to the grandiose techno-narcissistic dogma that has turned the American landscape into a wilderness of free parking, anxiety, and ennui. Nir Buras’s The Art of Classic Planning presents a new template for a human habitat with a plausible future.”—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency

“In the face of the triple threat of rapid urbanization, climate change, and natural resource depletion, we urgently need to relearn the art of building beautiful and enduring communities, as set out in The Art of Classic Planning, to ensure future generations can prosper.”—Ben Bolgar, The Prince’s Foundation

“A veritable bible of urbanism, Nir Buras’s The Art of Classic Planning is a formidable challenge to modernist principles.”—Hillel Schocken, Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University

“This compendium should be understood not as an attempt to constrain urbanism to the classical, but rather to extend the range of urbanism to include the classical. Why on earth would an urbanist want to be without this trove of knowhow on the table?”—Andrés Duany, FAIA, CNU, recipient of the Driehaus Prize and coauthor of Suburban Nation