Rebuilding the American Town

Small towns like Sudbury are often overlooked and understudied. This talk by architect and urban designer David Gamble will highlight what smaller populations are doing to capitalize on their intrinsic assets. The examples will make visible the spaces and stories enabling towns to remain vibrant and viable in the face of suburban sprawl, population loss, disinvestment, and how these challenges are playing out at local and regional levels. The research provides a new lens for contemporary urbanism today. Urbanism that is not metrocentric, but advances qualities of life for residents through creative, tactical, and strategic transformations that are properly sized for the populations they serve. The urban design interventions demonstrate that innovative design and planning does not only reside in big cities between the coasts. The cases are drawn from the recently published book, Rebuilding the American Town: Planning and Design at Small Scale, by Gamble and Patty Heyda.

David Gamble is a Lecturer in Urban Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is Founding Principal of Gamble Associates, an architecture, urban design, and planning firm based in Cambridge that focuses on community redevelopment and neighborhood revitalization. He has also taught at Harvard University, Syracuse University, and Northeastern University. Gamble is former chair of the Urban Design Committees at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Boston Society for Architecture (BSA). His prior work experience includes Chan Krieger Sieniewicz (now NBBJ), as well as European firms such as Krier Kohl in Berlin and Van Merksteijn in Potsdam and Zurich.

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