What happens to the landscape, to community, and to the population when vacated big box stores are turned into community centers, churches, schools, and libraries? America is becoming a container landscape of big boxes connected by highways. When a big box store upsizes to an even bigger box "supercenter" down the road, it leaves behind more than the vacant shell of a retail operation; it leaves behind a changed landscape that can't be changed back. Acres of land have been paved around it. Highway traffic comes to it; local roads end at it. With thousands of empty big box stores spread across America, these vistas have become a dominant feature of the American landscape. In Big Box Reuse, Julia Christensen shows us how ten communities have addressed this problem, turning vacated Wal-Marts and Kmarts into something else: a church, a library, a school, a medical center, a courthouse, a recreation center, a museum, or other more civic-minded structures. In each case, what was once a shopping destination becomes a center of community life. Christensen crisscrossed America identifying these projects, then photographed, videotaped, and interviewed the people involved. The first-person accounts and color photographs of Big Box Reuse reveal the hidden stories behind the transformation of these facades into gateways of community life. Whether a big box store becomes a "Senior Resource Center" or a museum devoted to Spam (the kind that comes in a can), each renovation displays a community's resourcefulness and creativity--but also raises questions about how big box buildings affect the lives of communities. What does it mean for us and for the future of America if the spaces of commerce built by a few monolithic corporations become the sites where education, medicine, religion, and culture are dispensed wholesale to the populace?

We all throw away too much stuff! Watch Tyler find ways to reuse his old things. Can you think of new uses for items you would have tossed? Do your part to be a planet protector! Discover how to reduce, reuse, recycle, and more with Tyler and Trina in the Planet Protectors series, part of the Cloverleaf Books collection. These nonfiction picture books feature kid-friendly text and illustrations to make learning fun!

How to reimagine existing buildings to create a more sustainable future The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for 41 percent of all primary energy use and 48 percent of all carbon emissions, and the impact of the demolition and removal of an older building can greatly diminish the advantages of adding green technologies to new construction. In Building Reuse, Kathryn Rogers Merlino makes an impassioned case that truly sustainable design requires reusing and reimagining existing buildings. Additionally, Merlino calls for a more expansive view of preservation that goes beyond keeping only the most distinctive structures based on their historical and cultural significance to embrace the creative reuse of even unremarkable buildings for their environmental value. Building Reuse includes a compelling range of case studies—from a private home to an eighteen-story office building—all located in the Pacific Northwest, a region with a long history of sustainable design and urban growth policies that have made reuse projects feasible. Reusing existing buildings can be challenging to accomplish, but changing the way we think about environmentally conscious architecture has the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption, carbon emissions, and waste.

Breathe new life into your art with this incredible new take on a seemingly mundane material. New artists and experts alike will take so much from The Art of Cardboard.

Let's face it. Recycling has its limits. But so does our Earth. As environmentalists Robert Lilienfeld and William Rathje explain, the answer to our twenty-first-century garbage crisis is both simple and practical -- use less stuff. This groundbreaking consumer guide suggests helpful money- and energy-saving tips for concerned citizens who care about how we live today and tomorrow. Learn to Reduce and Reuse with creative suggestions for all areas of your life, including: -- At home: Turn down the heat before guests arrive for a party -- the extra body heat will warm up the room-- During the holidays: Save gift boxes to use the following year-- At the store: Buy concentrated products -- like juice and detergent-- At the office: Donate or sell old office equipment-- When traveling: Leave unused hotel amenities for the next guest-- At school: Post announcements on a school Web site-- In the great outdoors: Bring magic markers to your picnic so guests can label their cups and platesAnd many more!

Have you ever wondered what happens to a plastic bottle when you no longer need it? This lovely bedtime story helps children understand how and why we should recycle our plastic.

Updated with a new Introduction by the authors and a foreword by Richard Florida, this book is a comprehensive guide book for urban designers, planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, and community leaders that illustrates how existing suburban developments can be redesigned into more urban and more sustainable places. While there has been considerable attention by practitioners and academics to development in urban cores and new neighborhoods on the periphery of cities, there has been little attention to the redesign and redevelopment of existing suburbs. The authors, both architects and noted experts on the subject, show how development in existing suburbs can absorb new growth and evolve in relation to changed demographic, technological, and economic conditions. Retrofitting Suburbia was named winner in the Architecture & Urban Planning category of the 2009 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (The PROSE Awards) awarded by The Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers

Have you ever wondered what happens to a cardboard box when you no longer need it? This lovely bedtime story helps children understand how and why we should recycle our cardboard.

Historically, we see the city as the cramped, crumbling core of development and culture, and the suburb as the vast outlying wasteland – convenient, but vacant. Contemporary urban design proves this wrong. In New SubUrbanisms, Judith De Jong explains the on-going "flattening" of the American Metropolis, as suburbs are becoming more like their central cities – and cities more like their suburbs through significant changes in spatial and formal practice as well as demographic and cultural changes. These revisionist practices are exemplified in the emergence of hybrid sub/urban conditions such as parking practices, the residential densification of suburbia, hyper-programmed public spaces and inner city big-box retail, among others. Each of these hybridized conditions reflects to varying degrees the reciprocating influences of the urban and the suburban. Each also offers opportunities for innovation in new formal and spatial practices that re-configure conventional understandings of urban and suburban, and in new ways of forming the evolving American metropolis. Based on this new understanding, De Jong argues for the development of new ways of building the city. Aimed at students and practitioners of urban design and planning New SubUrbanisms attempts to re-frame the contemporary metropolis in a way that will generate more instrumental engagement – and ultimately, better design.

How small-to-midsize Rust Belt cities can play a crucial role in a low-carbon, sustainable, and relocalized future. America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities—Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others—increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, small industrial cities seem to be part of America's past, not its future. And yet, Catherine Tumber argues in this provocative book, America's gritty Rust Belt cities could play a central role in a greener, low-carbon, relocalized future. As we wean ourselves from fossil fuels and realize the environmental costs of suburban sprawl, we will see that small cities offer many assets for sustainable living not shared by their big city or small town counterparts, including population density and nearby, fertile farmland available for new environmentally friendly uses. Tumber traveled to twenty-five cities in the Northeast and Midwest—from Buffalo to Peoria to Detroit to Rochester—interviewing planners, city officials, and activists, and weaving their stories into this exploration of small-scale urbanism. Smaller cities can be a critical part of a sustainable future and a productive green economy. Small, Gritty, and Green will help us develop the moral and political imagination we need to realize this.