If this book came out in 2006 rather than at the end of 2013, I just might have used it as a reference while in graduate school for urban design. Much of my work on our class project located in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, looked at the town's streets: all varying degrees of depressing. While it's hard to imagine the many examples peppering the book by Dover and Massengale being directly applicable to a frontier oil town in the Amazon jungle, it's hard to deny their assertion that "making good streets comes naturally to people." The focus in their book is clearly on improving towns, suburbs, and cities in the United States, though the examples are culled from other countries as well. Although the authors focus on design in a primarily neo-traditional manner (much of it culled from Dover's practice), it's hard to argue with their general approach to give more parts of streets back to pedestrians and turn them into healthier places to be.