Urban Alchemy

Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities

Fullilove MT. Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities, New Village Press, 2013.

Distributed by NYUPress – purchase here.

An identification of the problems of divided neighborhoods and nine tools that can mend them 

What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if cities could help each other?

Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, the acclaimed author of Root Shock, uses her unique perspective as a public health psychiatrist to explore and identify ways of healing social and spatial fractures simultaneously. Using the work of French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart and the American urban design firm Rothschild Doyno Collaborative as guides as well as urban restoration projects from France and the US as exemplary cases, Fullilove identifies nine tools that can mend our broken cities and reconnect our communities to make them whole.