Consider these two housing environments.

Walking into Green Acres, you immediately sense that you have entered an oasis-traffic noise left behind, negative urban distractions out of sight, children playing and running on the grass, adults puttering on plant-filled balconies. Signs of life and care for the environment abound. Innumerable social and physical clues communicate to visitors and residents alike a sense of home and neighborhood. This is a place that people are proud of, a place that children will remember in later years with nostalgia and affection, a place that just feels "good."

Contrast this with Southside Village. Something does not feel quite right. It is hard to find your way about, to discern which are the fronts and which are the backs of the houses, to determine what is "inside" and what is "outside." Strangers cut across what might be a communal backyard. There are no signs of personalization around doors or on balconies. Few children are around; those who are outside ride their bikes in circles in the parking lot. There are few signs of caring; litter, graffiti, and broken light fixtures indicate the opposite. There is no sense of place; it is somewhere to move away from, not somewhere to remember with pride. These are not real locations, but we have all seen places like them.

The purpose of this book is to assist in the creation of more places like Green Acres and to aid in the rehabilitation of the many Southside Villages that scar our cities.

This book is a collection of guidelines for the site design of low-rise, high-density family housing. It is intended as a reference tool, primarily for housing designers and planners, but also for developers, housing authorities, citizens' groups, and tenants' organizations—anyone involved in planning or rehabilitating housing. It provides guidelines for the layout of buildings, open spaces, community facilities, play areas, walkways, and the myriad components that make up a housing site.

Still Relevant Today

Nearly forty years after its publication, Housing As If People Mattered remains a foundational text on the design of family housing — and it is still in print. Written for designers, planners, developers, housing authorities, and the residents themselves, the book set out plain-spoken, evidence-based guidelines for how the physical layout of medium-density housing shapes everyday life: how children play safely, how neighbours meet or don't, how a shared courtyard can build community or breed conflict. Long before "human-centred design" became a familiar phrase, this book insisted that the people who actually live in a place are the ones whose needs should shape it.

That insistence has only grown more relevant. As cities worldwide turn to medium-density, missing-middle, and infill housing to address affordability and climate pressures, the questions this book asked in 1986 — about safety, privacy, community, and dignity in the built environment — are the same ones today's planners and developers are asking again. The book's core conviction, that good site design is a matter of social justice as much as aesthetics, is why it continues to be assigned in planning and architecture programs and cited in contemporary housing research. I'm proud that the principles Clare Cooper Marcus and I set out together have outlasted the design fads of four decades, and I'm honoured to continue sharing her work and legacy.