NY: Routledge, 2006. Translated into Chinese and Farsi.

Integral Urbanism is an ambitious and forward-looking theory of urbanism that offers a new model of urban life. Nan Ellin’s model stands as an antidote to the pervasive problems engendered by modern and postmodern urban planning and architecture: sprawl, anomie, a pervasive culture – and architecture – of fear in cities, and a disregard for environmental issues. Instead of the reactive and escapist tendencies characterizing so much contemporary urban development, Ellin champions an ‘integral’ approach that reverses the fragmentation of our landscapes and lives through proactive design solutions.

Reviews

“Ellin is an integrator, finding connective tissue and illustrating ways to find it ourselves. Empowering practitioners, academics, and students as observers, she proffers a responsive metric for those fatigued by segregated analyses of things gone bad, and instead helps us read places as whole, interconnected, flowing systems…. With academic rigor, including delightfully readable annotations, Ellin’s exploration becomes an exuberant expression of where our collective disciplines might navigate new paths toward healing and repairing our desperate, failing places and systems…. Ellin offers a bold, fresh vocabulary for interpreting and understanding the interconnected systems that shape our places. If anyone is still looking for a new urbanism, looking through Ellin’s lens of an intergral urbanism captures a stable, elegant perspective on the fluctuating, uncertain ways that we order chaos.” – Stephen Goldsmith (former planning director for Salt Lake City and associate professor of City & Metropolitan Planning at University of Utah, reviewed for Journal of the American Planning Association)

“We live in the most urban of centuries. Yet, the 21st century city-region differs from its predecessors. In Integral Urbanism, Nan Ellin provides a clear and compelling portrait of this new urban landscape. Integral Urbanism is essential reading for planners, urban designers, and architects, for anyone who seeks to make sense of our present urban condition. Nan Ellin gives us hope for creating order out of chaos.” – Frederick Steiner (Dean of the School of Architecture at University of Texas-Austin, reviewed for Journal of Urban Affairs)

 “Integral Urbanism is essential reading for planners, urban designers, and architects, for anyone who seeks to make sense of our present urban condition. Nan Ellin gives us hope for creating order out of chaos.” – Dean Frederick Steiner (University of Pennsylvania) 

“To say [Integral Urbanism] should be read by every architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning student or professional would be short-sighted (though make no mistake – it should be). This is a book that I could only hope to find on the shelves of our policymakers and political leaders.” – Michael Wagner, Journalist

“Integral Urbanism is the continuation of the significant contribution Ellin is making to the theoretical basis for design action…. The principles of integral urbanism, because they are drawn from systematic as well as casual observations, inform the way we can examine diverse worlds and understand them better.” – Jon Lang, University of New South Wales, reviewed for Journal of Urban Design