Citistate Seattle: Shaping a Modern Metropolis

Planning success depends on the support of city dwellers, builders, and workers. But few citizens understand why planning matters to the look, feel, and experience of daily city life. Most planners are at a loss to explain. Not Mark Hinshaw. He regularly brings the public face-to-face with real-life planning through his columns in the Seattle Times. Now, in Citistate Seattle, this respected architect and certified planner addresses a national audience by documenting planning's triumphs, near misses, and outright failures in one of America's most interesting boom towns. Planners looking for a way to put a planning spin on familiar issues need look no farther than Hinshaw's example. With style and humor, Hinshaw writes of special places in everyday Seattle. He takes us to popular, high-profile landmarks like Pike Place Market as well as tucked-away gems cozy cottages, trendy pubs, gracious apartment buildings, and vibrant urban villages that flavor and enliven the city. He shares his eye for unique, humanizing details of design, architecture, and function, bringing this colorful metropolis to life so vividly you'll practically smell the coffee they brew and sell on (almost) every street corner. Along the way, Hinshaw explains the public and private decisions that helped Seattle avoid the urban desolation that plagues other American cities. He introduces many of Seattle's movers and shakers mayors, developers, artists, and urban pioneers who took it upon themselves to guide metropolitan Seattle along a different path.