Preserving and Enhancing Communities

This book starts from the premise that each community chooses its future every day, through the incremental decisions made by planning and zoning boards and other citizen volunteers, as well as professional staff. The challenge is to ensure that these decisions support the preservation of what is special about the community, while still fostering necessary and appropriate growth. In this volume, twenty-nine experts from a variety of fields describe in very practical terms the community preservation approach to these issues. As opposed to the top-down regulatory mechanisms that are sometimes used to manage growth, the contributors favor a more flexible, locally based approach that has proven successful in Massachusetts and elsewhere.