Sustainable Urban Design—An Environmental Approach. . - Reviews: Green Cities - book review

Architectural Review, The, April, 2003 by Adam Voelcker

Edited by Randall Thomas. London: Spon Press. 2003. [pounds sterling]26

By the end of the twenty-first century, it is highly possible that three-quarters of the world's population will be city-dwellers. The premise of this book is that, if this is so, then it is incumbent upon architects, planners and all those involved with building in cities to make them not only environmentally sustainable but habitable in terms of citizen well-being and happiness.

Part One of the book summarizes the principles by which urban sustainability is made possible. Transportation, landscape, building form and design, energy, materials, water and waste management are dealt with in separate chapters by Randall Thomas and his colleagues. All are presented succinctly and comprehensively, with further details elaborated in appendices.

Part Two is the weaker and more disappointing half. Six or so examples are used as demonstrations of how this new thinking is already at work, among them the Caspar project in Leeds, BedZED and the Parkmount scheme in Belfast. There is a mini-collection of three case-studies by Alan Short, frustratingly too short, and the final chapter on an ecological district in Malmo, heralded by Thomas as something exemplary, somehow fails to get going at all.

In his introduction, Thomas states that one of the book's aims is 'to inspire rather than to be prescriptive'. I applaud the optimism which he and his co-authors express in their contributions, but it's an optimism which I find difficult to share, and had hoped the book might bolster.