Published in 2002, *Above and Beyond: Visualizing Change in Small Towns and Rural Areas* examines how patterns of development reshape the American landscape. Julie Campoli and Elizabeth Humstone provide the planning context, while Alex S. MacLean’s aerial photographs make the consequences of sprawl legible from above: the spread of settlement, the separation of everyday functions, and the pressure placed on established town and rural forms.

The book’s method is both documentary and comparative. Many photographs are paired with computer simulations that show how landscapes change over time, turning abstract planning debates into visible alternatives. Against fragmented, car-oriented expansion, the authors present communities that have strengthened town centers, brought living, working, shopping, and recreation closer together, and revised land-use rules in favor of more compact development. The argument is therefore carried not only by images, but by the relationship between evidence, projection, and civic example.

MacLean’s aerial perspective gives the volume its distinctive visual authority. Roads, parcels, fields, neighborhoods, and centers become elements in a larger spatial system, allowing small-town change to be considered at the scale at which planning decisions accumulate. The photographs do not simply record places; in combination with the simulations and case studies, they ask how those places might develop differently.

For collectors of photobooks concerned with landscape, architecture, and social space, this is a significant interdisciplinary work. Its subject is firmly rooted in the United States of the early twenty-first century, yet its central questions remain visually and politically clear: how does settlement expand, what does it displace, and what forms of community can planning protect? Issued in English by the American Planning Association, the 210-page paperback brings photographic observation into direct conversation with urban and rural policy.