People Rebuilding Berkeley – The Self-Creating Life of Neighborhoods

The book is a reprint of the 1974 project report with the same title, addressed to the Master Plan Revision Committee of the City of Berkeley. It demonstrates an early approach to the idea of piecemeal development applied to the organic fabric of streets in a town, and proposes the local neighborhood as the fundamental unit for the master plan and the planning process. The basic point introduced was that the urban environment can be ordered by a small, step by step piecemeal process in which individuals do things with of various sizes and bugets, under the assumption that the city the size of Berkeley, with an annual budget of $20.000.000 (in 1974) would allocate a total of $2.000.000 to this process, thus allowing 200 projects a year to happen.