In Neighbourhood: Designing a Liveable Community, renowned architect, professor and urban planner Avi Friedman describes the planning of a new neighbourhood in Middlesex Centre, a rural municipality in southern Ontario. Friedman explores how good and bad design affect our homes and civic life. In his quest to build a new kind of neighbourhood, Friedman talks about personal architectural and community touchstones that have informed his work through the years.

Over the past decade or more, worrisome signs—climate change, depletion of natural resources, unrelenting urban sprawl, the tyranny of the automobile, the decline of face-to-face human contact—have motivated us to radically rethink home and community design. In Avi Friedman’s view, these issues have combined to force us to question fundamental practices and come up with better solutions.