Life in the city is popular and creating liveable urban space is undoubtedly a priority for planners. Yet what makes a city worth living in? How do we define sustainable neighbourhoods that will function properly and continue to attract people in the future? What does "Smart City" or "resilience" really mean? The completely revised, new edition of this publication provides the answers. It addresses the fundamental challenges of urban planning today and offers planners essential knowledge, implementation strategies and ways toward holistic concept development. Examples of international neighbourhood developments clearly show how aspects of sustainable urban planning can be implemented in practice.

Written by the chair of the LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) initiative, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature is both an urgent call to action and a comprehensive introduction to "sustainable urbanism"--the emerging and growing design reform movement that combines the creation and enhancement of walkable and diverse places with the need to build high-performance infrastructure and buildings. Providing a historic perspective on the standards and regulations that got us to where we are today in terms of urban lifestyle and attempts at reform, Douglas Farr makes a powerful case for sustainable urbanism, showing where we went wrong, and where we need to go. He then explains how to implement sustainable urbanism through leadership and communication in cities, communities, and neighborhoods. Essays written by Farr and others delve into such issues as: Increasing sustainability through density. Integrating transportation and land use. Creating sustainable neighborhoods, including housing, car-free areas, locally-owned stores, walkable neighborhoods, and universal accessibility. The health and environmental benefits of linking humans to nature, including walk-to open spaces, neighborhood stormwater systems and waste treatment, and food production. High performance buildings and district energy systems. Enriching the argument are in-depth case studies in sustainable urbanism, from BedZED in London, England and Newington in Sydney, Australia, to New Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California and Dongtan, Shanghai, China. An epilogue looks to the future of sustainable urbanism over the next 200 years. At once solidly researched and passionately argued, Sustainable Urbanism is the ideal guidebook for urban designers, planners, and architects who are eager to make a positive impact on our--and our descendants'--buildings, cities, and lives.

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 levels organize the processes, highlight connections between entities and decode the high-level planning and decision making process affecting infrastructure. For each system level strategic objectives of planning are determined. The objectives correspond to the five focus areas of the Zofnass program: Quality of life, Natural World, Climate and Risk, Resource Allocation, Leadership. Developed through the Zofnass Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, this approach integrates the key infrastructure systems of Energy, Landscape, Transportation, Waste, Water, Information and Food and explores their synergies through land use planning, engineering, economics and policy. The size and complexity of infrastructure systems means that multiple stakeholders facing their own challenges and agendas are involved in planning; this book creates a common, collaborative platform between public authorities, planners, and engineers. It is an essential resource for those seeking Envision Sustainability Professionals accreditation.

By the end of the twenty-first century it is thought that three-quarters of the world’s population will be urban; our future is in cities. Making these cities healthy, vibrant and sustainable is an exceptional challenge which this book addresses. It sets out some of the basic principles of the design of our future cities and, through a series of carefully-selected case studies from leading designers’ experience, illustrates how these ideas can be put into practice. Building on the first edition's original format of design guidance and case studies, this new edition updates the ideas and techniques resulting from further research and practice by the contributors. This book emphasises the enormous progress made towards exciting new designs that integrate good design with resource efficiency.

Developing an approach for sustainable planning framework in the Indian context is extremely complex due to the diversity in the urban and metropolitan regions in the country. Sustainable Urban Planning attempts to clarify the planning process and sets a broad framework of urban planning in the country. The book focuses on the planning reality of fundamental dimensions of sustainability and explains a work framework of the dynamics of sustainable planning in India. The present book clarifies the planning process to students, who are trying to work in the Indian context. It presents in three sections a set of interwoven discussions. Section one operates on the corpus of planning reality to disentangle the sutras of fundamental dimensions of sustainability and the interrelationship between these sutras to re-explain a working framework of the dynamics of sustainable planning in India. Section two expands on each of the dimensions, explaining their divergent parameters and their indispensable roles in the making of such a framework. Section three synthesizes all of them to form the framework itself.

The city in the twenty-first century faces major challenges, including social and economic stratification, wasteful consumption of resources, transportation congestion, and environmental degradation. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and major metropolitan areas, and in the next two decades the number of city dwellers is estimated to reach five billion. This puts enormous pressures on transportation systems, housing stock, and infrastructure such as energy, waste, and water, which directly influences the emissions of greenhouse gases. As the long emergency awaits us, urgent questions remain: How will our cities survive? How can we combat and reconcile urban growth with sustainable use of resources for future generations to thrive? Where and how urbanism comes into the picture and what “sustainable” urban forms can do in light of these events are some of the issues Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond explores. With more than sixty essays, including contributions by Andrés Duany, Saskia Sassen, Peter Newman, Douglas Farr, Henry Cisneros, Peter Hall, Sharon Zukin, Peter Eisenman, and others, this book is a unique perspective on architecture, urban planning, environmental and urban design, exploring ways for raising quality of life and the standard of living in a new modern era by creating better and more viable places to live.

This book begins with an introduction describing current societal transformations that merit new urban designs, including depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions, large numbers of aging “Baby Boomers,” and climate change. Dr. Friedman then examines these challenges through thirty chapters of interest to urban designers, architects, civil and construction engineers, and town planners. Each of these topics represents an aspect of urban design and describes an innovative solution and offers a detailed description of underlying principles. The highly illustrated text presents innovative urban design strategies based on sustainable principles. Integrated with each chapter are several international case studies illustrating design implementations.