Rural by Design: Maintaining Small Town Character

The Bible of Rural Land-Use Planning

Rural by Design: Maintaining Small Town Character by Randall Arendt. Planners Press, American Planning Association, Chicago, IL, 1994. Hardcover, 460 pages, $86.

This hefty volume is a detailed and comprehensive guide to land-use planning in rural America. In clear language with excellent examples and very useful graphics, Arendt and several contributing authors address the pros and cons of alternative rural settlement patterns, highlighting advantages of “traditional towns” with open space preserved for agriculture, wildlife, and recreation.

Rural by Design is an outgrowth of an excellent book,

Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley, that was published in 1988 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Massachusetts. (

EBN’s copy is heavily worn from extensive use.) As such,

Rural by Design has a definite New England flavor, but the authors have done a good job in ensuring that the book includes information relevant throughout North America.

Rural by Design includes a mix of case studies and detailed information on how to bring about the rural land-use visions presented. Specifics are provided on such wide-ranging topics as street design for rural subdivisions,

affordable housing, commercial infill development, innovative sewage disposal, “build-out” mapping, design of greenways, design for pedestrians, the economics of preserving open space (and hidden costs of sprawl), and farmland protection strategies. Though an expensive book,

Rural by Design is a must for anyone working on rural planning and development.

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