Reviews & Praise for This Land:

Reviews/Editors Choice, Audubon magazine, January-February 2007

"Exiles from Main Street," review in the Village Voice, December 15, 2006

Planetizen Top 10 Books List, 2007 Edition

Review in Middlebury College magazine

"This Land Examines the Brawl over Sprawl," book review in The Boston Globe October 2, 2006

Review by Alex Marshall in Spotlight on the Region, the newsletter of the Regional Plan Association

Review in Commonwealth magazine Summer 2006

Recommended by The Denver Post June 25, 2006

From the June 2006 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:
"A look at the long odds faced by the "smart growth" movement as suburban sprawl goes unchecked and its negative consequences become increasingly clear."

From the May 15, 2006 Library Journal:
"In this engaging, vivid, and provocative work, journalist Flint (Boston Globe) consolidates years of covering the causes and effects of sprawl (unplanned suburban expansion calling for increased reliance upon cars). ...Written with analytical rigor but also a crafty journalistic eye for the human-interest story that crystallizes an abstract theme, this book merits inclusion in any library and may spark discussion as misguided housing patterns reach crisis proportions." read more...
         --Whitney Strub, UCLA

From the May 28 2006 (Southern New Jersey) Courier Post:
" If you think there's nothing new to say -- or nothing new to do -- about sprawl, think again. This Land, Anthony Flint's thoughtful book about our ceaselessly suburbanizing nation, goes beyond hand wringing and haranguing. It makes practical suggestions on how we can individually and collectively manage America's go-go growth and avoid, in his words, a 'great national train wreck.'" read more...
         --Kevin Riordan

June 2006 Planning magazine -- Planners Library
"Flint asks good questions: Why, since smart growth was not antidevelopment, did it encounter such fierce resistance? And he makes some good observations: "Antisprawl activists say that conventional suburban development is popular because it's pretty much the only thing that's offered. But suburban development does seem to be what an awful lot of Americans want."
Flint knows the issue is important, but he also knows that it's so localized and fragmented that few Americans see it as an issue. " read more...
         -- Harold Henderson

"This important book is spot on in its analysis of America's deepening land-use problems, and refreshingly upbeat in its account of win-win solutions arising around the country. Flint's fingertip knowledge of detail is especially to be admired."
         -- Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, author, The Future of Life

"With evidence growing regarding the impact of density on innovation and economic growth, Anthony Flint's excellent This Land couldn't come along at a better time. It's an essential read for those working to understand and build more vibrant and livable communities."
         --Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class

"A superb feat of reporting and analysis. Our intensifying urban land use wars—most notably, between new movements on behalf of better-planned, more compact growth and those who have mobilized, explicitly or effectively, in defense of sprawl--have rarely seemed more absorbing, and have never been rendered more comprehensibly. For anyone who cares about these issues, a must read."
         -- Alan Altshuler, dean, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

"Among the hundreds of books about metropolitan growth, This Land stands out as an extremely engaging and perceptive chronicle of the current state of the smart growth and new urbanist movements. Highlighting the fundamental American tension between individual and collective purposes, Flint compellingly articulates the challenges ahead."
         --Ann Forsyth, Director, Metropolitan Design Center

"A revealing portrait of how America lives today. His trenchant chronicling of the emerging smart growth movement's challenge to the suburban sprawl ethos is a clarion call for a national conversation about how the country should grow."
         --Ben Bradlee Jr. , author and former Deputy Managing Editor of the Boston Globe