Sustainable Urbanism Urban design with nature

Abstract

Mankind is becoming increasingly urbanized: there will be five and a half billion people by 2025; worldwide, one in two people now lives in areas highly populated. Just this fact to argue that environmental sustainability is an urban issue, the challenge is the search for a new urbanity. This is why the battle for sustainable development, for a healthier one, just and stable, from the point of view of the environment, is to fight, to a large extent in the cities.
The western economic model, which was asserted with the industrial revolution, produces a great alteration of ecosystems and a large-scale environmental change. The revision of the classical economistic finalization of the dynamics of transformation requires the search for new settlement patterns. In this cultural background, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to sustainable urbanism. Written by Douglas Farr, the chair of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) initiative, and by worthy American experts on sustainable urban design, who are involved with both the Congress for the New Urbanism and the US Green Building Council, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature is an urgent call to action and a comprehensive introduction to sustainable urbanism.
The book, published by John Wiley & Sons Inc. in the 2008, is organized into four parts, eleven chapters plus a preface.
The first part: The case for sustainable urbanism, is divided in two chapters: The built environment: where we are today and Sustainable urbanism: where we need to go. This part functions essentially as an outline for courses in planning, architecture, engineering, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary sustainable development that could be used to train development professionals, public officials, and municipal staff on the emerging practice of sustainable urbanism. It narrates and quantifies the magnitude of the problem, provides a history of pioneering reforms, makes the compelling case for sustainable urbanism, and outlines an agenda of strategic reforms leading to the dominance of sustainable urbanism. (...)