Download or read book Smart Growth written by Jon Reeds and published by Green Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People who live in compact, traditional towns have far smaller environmental footprints than those who live in sprawling suburbs. So why are we in thrall to urban sprawl? Are there better ways of getting about than by car? And how can 60 million people crammed into a small island find ways of treating it with respect? Urban sprawl is unsustainable in an age of climate change and peak oil. But for 100 years the UK’s planning policies have been based on ideals of low-density living and attitudes that favour the individual over community, creating car-dependent lifestyles and destroying the countryside we love. This book explains what we must do to improve the quality of life in our overcrowded land. Smart Growth argues that we should look to America – a country that embraced urban sprawl and car dependency on a far grander scale than we ever did, and is now finding answers to the problem. Its ‘Smart Growth’ movement is steering a course towards better-designed, compact cities and rail-based transit systems, thereby restoring communities ruined by decades of suburban insularity.
Download or read book From Sprawl to Sustainability written by Robert H. Freilich and published by American Bar Association. This book was released on 2010 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rev. ed. of: From sprawl to smart growth.
Download or read book Ten Things Wrong with Sprawl written by James M. McElfish and published by . This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. population will grow by over 92 million in the next 35 years. If sprawl development patterns continue to prevail, what are the likely consequences for America, its communities, and its resources? Ten Things Wrong with Sprawl draws on examples from across the country to identify detrimental effects from sprawl development patterns, and to suggest why it is time to pursue changes in law and policy to eliminate the adverse consequences of our current development approach.
Download or read book Sustainable Urbanism written by Douglas Farr and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Once There Were Greenfields written by F. Kaid Benfield and published by Nrdc. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is pursuit of the American dream becoming a nightmare? Once There Were Greenfields presents the story of one of America's most challenging social problems, sprawl development. Community downtowns are being replaced with strip malls. Farmland is giving way to parking lots. Meanwhile, inner cities are losing jobs and the tax base necessary to support public schools. This book meticulously documents the consequences of sprawling growth patterns and proposes guiding principles for a new kind of "smart" growth that combines economic progress with environmental protection and social goals. Book jacket.
Download or read book Growing Compact written by Joo Hwa P. Bay and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing Compact: Urban Form, Density and Sustainability explores and unravels the phenomena, links and benefits between density, compactness and the sustainability of cities. It looks at the socio-climatic implications of density and takes a more holistic approach to sustainable urbanism by understanding the correlations between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of the city, and the challenges and opportunities with density. The book presents contributions from internationally well-known scholars, thinkers and practitioners whose theoretical and practical works address city planning, urban and architectural design for density and sustainability at various levels, including challenges in building resilience against climate change and natural disasters, capacity and integration for growth and adaptability, ageing, community and security, vegetation, food production, compact resource systems and regeneration.
Download or read book Energy Sprawl Solutions written by Joseph M. Kiesecker and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the next several decades, as human populations grow, the demand for energy will soar. But renewable energy sources have a large energy sprawl--the amount of land needed to produce energy--which can threaten biodiversity. In Energy Sprawl Solutions, scientists Joseph M. Kiesecker and David Naugle provide a roadmap for preserving biodiversity despite the threats of energy sprawl. Their strategy--development by design--identifies and sets aside land where biodiversity can thrive while consolidating development in areas with lower biodiversity value. This contributed volume features case studies from countries around the world, each describing a different energy sector and the way they have successfully maximized biodiversity protection. This book provides a needed guide for elected officials, industry representatives, NGOs and community groups who have a stake in sustainable energy-development planning.
Download or read book Green Metropolis written by David Owen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes. A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
Download or read book Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth written by Yonn Dierwechter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the new urban geographies of “smart” metropolitan regionalism across the Greater Seattle area and examines the relationship between smart growth planning strategies and spaces of work, home, and mobility. The book specifically explores Seattle within the wider space-economy and multi-scaled policy regime of the Puget Sound region as a whole, ‘jumping up’ from questions of city politics to concerns with what the book interprets as the “intercurrence” of city-regional “ordering." These theoretical terms capture the state-progressive effort to promote smarter forms of regional development but also the societal/institutional tensions and outright contradictions that such urban development invariably entails, particularly around problems of social equity. Key organizing themes in the text include: the historical path-dependencies of uneven economic and social development, particularly between Tacoma-Pierce County and Seattle-King County; current patterns of high-wage, medium-wage, and low-wage jobs; the emerging spatial and social structure of recent residential changes, especially with respect to class and race composition; and, finally, transit trends and new urban spaces associated with policy efforts to mitigate highway congestion and car-dependency. Greater Seattle, then, is mapped as a key US urban region inscribed spatially by the uneven search for a more sustainable order. Historically-sensitive, theoretically-informed and empirically topical, this book is of interest to scholars and students at all levels in regional planning, urban geography, political science, sustainability studies, urban sociology and public policy.
Download or read book Green Urbanism written by Timothy Beatley and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the need to confront unplanned growth increases, planners, policymakers, and citizens are scrambling for practical tools and examples of successful and workable approaches. Growth management initiatives are underway in the U.S. at all levels, but many American "success stories" provide only one piece of the puzzle. To find examples of a holistic approach to dealing with sprawl, one must turn to models outside of the United States. In Green Urbanism, Timothy Beatley explains what planners and local officials in the United States can learn from the sustainable city movement in Europe. The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands. Chapters examine: the sustainable cities movement in Europe examples and ideas of different housing and living options transit systems and policies for promoting transit use, increasing bicycle use, and minimizing the role of the automobile creative ways of incorporating greenness into cities ways of readjusting "urban metabolism" so that waste flows become circular programs to promote more sustainable forms of economic development sustainable building and sustainable design measures and features renewable energy initiatives and local efforts to promote solar energy ways of greening the many decisions of local government including ecological budgeting, green accounting, and other city management tools. Throughout, Beatley focuses on the key lessons from these cities -- including Vienna, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin -- and what their experience can teach us about effectively and creatively promoting sustainable development in the United States. Green Urbanism is the first full-length book to describe urban sustainability in European cities, and provides concrete examples and detailed discussions of innovative and practical sustainable planning ideas. It will be a useful reference and source of ideas for urban and regional planners, state and local officials, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and anyone concerned with how cities can become more livable.
Download or read book Rethinking Urban Sprawl Moving Towards Sustainable Cities written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report provides a new perspective to the nature of urban sprawl and its causes and environmental, social and economic consequences.
Download or read book Urban Sprawl and Public Health written by Howard Frumkin and published by . This book was released on 2004-07-09 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Urban Sprawl and Public Health' offers a survey of the impact that the built environment can have on the health of the people who inhabit our cities. The authors go on to suggest ways in which the design of cities could be improved & have a positive impact on the well-being of their citizens.
Download or read book Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia written by K. Valentine Cadieux and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.
Download or read book Growing Smarter written by Robert D. Bullard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-01-12 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and mixed land use. But, as this book documents, smart growth has largely failed to address issues of social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. Growing Smarter is one of the few books to view smart growth from an environmental justice perspective, examining the effect of the built environment on access to economic opportunity and quality of life in American cities and metropolitan regions. The contributors to Growing Smarter—urban planners, sociologists, economists, educators, lawyers, health professionals, and environmentalists—all place equity at the center of their analyses of "place, space, and race." They consider such topics as the social and environmental effects of sprawl, the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty, and community-based regionalism that can link cities and suburbs. They examine specific cases that illustrate opportunities for integrating environmental justice concerns into smart growth efforts, including the dynamics of sprawl in a South Carolina county, the debate over the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and transportation-related pollution in Northern Manhattan. Growing Smarter illuminates the growing racial and class divisions in metropolitan areas today—and suggests workable strategies to address them.
Download or read book Cities written by Pierre Jacquet and published by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-first century is already an urban one. Cities are pivotal to sustainability concerns globalization, climate change, food security, environmental protection, and innovation.Today's urban actors, both citizens and their leaders, have a major responsibility as trustees of the future: their present actions will influence the shape and structure of cities, so that the generation to come may live healthy and contended lives.This volume takes the reader straight to the heart of how cities work, and identifies contemporary trends, mechanism and tools that can influence current strategies and choices.The authors show that urbanization is not a problem per se for sustainable development, but rather that cities, in all their diversity and complexity, offer solutions as well as challenges.The reader will be inspired by vital analyses of the next decade's windows of opportunity for sustainable urban growth.
Download or read book Nature in Fragments written by Elizabeth A. Johnson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-05 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection focuses on the impact of sprawl on biodiversity and the measures that can be taken to alleviate it. Leading biological and social scientists, conservationists, and land-use professionals examine how sprawl affects species and alters natural communities, ecosystems, and natural processes. The contributors integrate biodiversity issues, concerns, and needs into the growing number of anti-sprawl initiatives, including the "smart growth" and "new urbanist" movements.
Download or read book Examining International Land Use Policies Changes and Conflicts written by Hasnat, G. N. Tanjina and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2020-11-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though conflicts continue to arise over land use and land cover changes, the conversion of forest land to cropland or other land uses such as housing and urban development have been on the rise in recent years. Decisions regarding land use and land cover influence climate change as well as various natural processes. While proper changes can minimize the effects and speed of climatic changes, the continued adverse changes may be accelerating the deterioration of the world’s condition. Examining International Land Use Policies, Changes, and Conflicts presents the latest research on the present status of land use and land cover changes throughout the world in order to determine appropriate land use policies that can protect earth’s present and future condition. The findings of the studies investigate the conflicts behind the land tenure and land uses in different countries of the world and examines existing policies and the reasons behind changes in them. Ultimately, the book provides readers with knowledge on how land can be managed in a sustained manner, how landscape models are helpful for predicting and determining future land uses, how land can be managed with the best architectural measures, and how urban forestry is helpful for better environmental management and adapting or mitigating climate change effects. Land users, agriculturalists, urban planners, policymakers, government officials, researchers, academicians, and students looking to improve their understanding of this topic for better use of land in the future will find this book to be an asset to their current research.
