Joan Mooney

Joan Mooney is a longtime writer and editor who for many years was senior editor of AutoExec, the magazine of the National Automobile Dealers Association. As a freelancer, she has written about such diverse topics as the resurgence of streetcars for On Common Ground magazine, the suburbanization of poverty for Urban Land, recumbent trikes for the AARP Bulletin and water infrastructure and supply for the National Association of Realtors.

Something in Japan needs to change under its current outlook, writes Clyde Prestowitz, a longtime Asia expert and Asian trade negotiator for the Reagan and Clinton administrations, in Japan Restored: How Japan Can Reinvent Itself and Why This Is Important for America and the World. And other developed countries may soon face the same fate.
In Slum Health, University of California, Berkeley, professors Jason Corburn and Lee Riley show that poor health in slums cannot be addressed separately from the social conditions that bring it about.
Many observers are wondering how Cuba and its economy will react to the opening of relations with the United States, and Richard E. Feinberg, a senior fellow in the Latin America initiative at the Brookings Institution, explores the question in his book Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy.
Authors Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senseable City Laboratory, use “futurecraft”—not predicting the future, but influencing it positively—to present ideas about what the city will look like years from now.
“Urban living is one of the key drivers of unsustainability,” said Ed Groak, chairman of the Worldwatch Institute, at the recent launch of the 2016 State of the World report, Can a City Be Sustainable?Despite the many challenges, the report indicates that the answer is yes.
In this 2014 book, now available in paperback, transit advocate Benjamin Ross highlights some of the origins of suburban sprawl in the United States.
How three affordable housing projects are integrating solar to keep energy costs in check.
It is easy to paint a black-and-white picture of China’s environmental policies. But in this book, Julie Sze is able to bring a more nuanced view. The professor from the University of California, Irvine, looks at eco-cities and explores prominent examples in China that involved global engineering and design firms.
When Alex Morrison, executive director of the Urban Development Authority for Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, started on a comprehensive plan for downtown revitalization, “we knew we wanted walkability and housing,” he said. “But the how and where [were] driven by the public process.” His emphasis on community engagement drove home a point in a new guidebook, (Re)Building Downtown: A Guidebook for Revitalization, from Smart Growth America.
Jared Green started to write Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable Worldas a much-needed effort to avoid fatalism about the future, especially the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, and rising inequality.
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