Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions

by Stephen J. Coyle, Andrés Duany (Foreword)

The ultimate step-by-step action plan guidebook for making communities resilient, resourceful, and healthyMany of today's communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-being in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies, rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient. Sustainable and Resilient Communities delineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems--transportation, energy, water, natural environment, food production, solid waste, and for assessing a community's key sustainability quotientDeploying tools for establishing timely performance goals and metricsDeveloping strategies for evaluating, selecting, and implementing 'high-leverage' interventionsActivating policies, codes, programs, plans, and practices, as well as monitoring and upgrading their performanceThe book includes a range of targeted case studies, from New Orleans and South Carolina to Arizona and California, illustrating geographically diverse approaches for urban contexts large and small.A resource for developing an ecological urbanism, Sustainable and Resilient Communities employs time-proven, broadly applicable strategies and actions that can be customized for specific environmental, energy, and economic conditions.

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 20, 2011

Reviews

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is, like most books "built by committee," very much a hit or miss affair. The chapters dealing with waste and transportation were pretty good. I found the other chapters to be pretty lackluster. Too much of the book focuses not on practical steps to be taken to make communities "greener," but to the mechanisms of legal and municipal wrangling surrounding how to get authorization to proceed with green programs.

These sort of tedious details do need to be hammered out in order to acquire authorizations in most communities before one can go through with the kinds of plans outlined in this book, but too much of the text is taken up with this kind of minutiae. Conversely, other portions of the book are too vague and general. Rather than giving specific details on how to plan for certain systems/modes of going green, all we as the public get are recommendations for software programs to download that should help with the task, some of which are prohibitively expensive.

There are some good sections in this book, but for the most part I found it to be a rough, uneven and unrewarding slog. There has to be a better book (or books on the subject). Not recommended for the general reader, although those who already possess some specialized knowledge may find it rewarding.