Planning Sustainable Cities: An infrastructure-based approach provides an analytical framework for urban sustainability, focusing on the services and performance of infrastructure systems.The book approaches infrastructure as a series of systems that function in synergy and are directly linked with urban planning. This method streamlines and guides the planning process, while still highlighting detail, each infrastructure system is decoded in four "system levels". The leve...

You're overseeing a large-scale project, but you're not an engineering or construction specialist, and so you need an overview of the related sustainability concerns and processes. To introduce you to the main issues, experts from the fields of engineering, planning, public health, environmental design, architecture, and landscape architecture review current sustainable large-scale projects, the roles team members hold, and design approaches, including alternative development and financing...

With increasing awareness of the urgent need to respond to global warming by reducing carbon emissions and recognition of the social benefits of car-free and car-lite living, more and more city planners, advocates, and everyday urban dwellers are demanding new ways of building cities. In Low Car(bon) Communities, authors Nicole Foletta and Jason Henderson examine seven case studies in Europe and the United States that aim explicitly to reduce dependency on cars. Innovative and ins...

Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the "greening" of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And ...

Metropolitan Indigenous Cultural Centres have become a focal point for making Indigenous histories and contemporary cultures public in settler-colonial societies over the past three decades. While there are extraordinary success stories, there are equally stories that cause concern: award-winning architecturally designed Indigenous cultural centres that have been abandoned; centres that serve the interests of tourists but fail to nourish the cultural interests of Indigenous stakeholders; a...

City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form. While many contemporary codes encourage sprawl and even urban blight, that hasn't always been the case-and it shouldn't be in the future.Talen provides a visually rich h...

Peter Hall and Colin Ward wrote Sociable Cities to celebrate the centenary of publication of Ebenezer Howard’s To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1998 – an event they then marked by co-editing (with Dennis Hardy) the magnificent annotated facsimile edition of Howard’s original, long lost and very scarce, in 2003. In this revised edition of Sociable Cities, sadly now without Colin Ward, Peter Hall writes: ‘the sixteen years separating the two editions of...

Sustainable design is booming, but the men and women dedicated to reducing their carbon impact have lost sight of what they are trying to save: the natural world. Author Neil Chambers has been at the forefront of cutting-edge, sustainable architecture for years, and Urban Green is his revolutionary vision for bringing the power of the conservation and design movements together. He advocates looking to nature for the missing components of the green revolution: oysters that can clea...

With a foreword from Paul King, Chief Executive, UK Green Building Council and Chairman, Zero Carbon HubAs concerns over climate change and resource constraints grow, many cities across the world are trying to achieve a low carbon transition. Although new zero carbon buildings are an important part of the story, in existing cities the transformation of the current building stock and urban infrastructure must inevitably form the main focus for transitioning to a low carbon and susta...

Smart city development has emerged a major issue over the past 5 years. Since the launch of IBM’s Smart Planet and CISCO’s Smart Cities and Communities programmes, their potential to deliver on global sustainable development targets have captured the public’s attention. However, despite this growing interest in the development of smart cities, little has as yet been published that either sets out the state-of-the-art, or which offers a less than subjective, arm’s length and dispassionate a...

Place-Keeping presents the latest research and practice on place-keeping – that is, the long-term management of public and private open spaces – from around Europe and the rest of the world. There has long been a focus in urban landscape planning and urban design on the creation of high-quality public spaces, or place-making. This is supported by a growing body of research which shows how high-quality public spaces are economically and socially beneficial for local communities and...

Science parks are becoming established in increasing numbers in almost all parts of the world. Promoted as places on the frontiers of science where a new breed of scientist-entrepreneur invents a new future, extolled as high-status workplaces where a new style of employee and flexible labour process is in the making, they are seen as the potential saviours of local and national economies.High-Tech Fantasies criticises the divisive hype of science parks arguing that both the...