Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature

By: Douglas Farr  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

• 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.

Publisher: Wiley

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Expanding the Base of the Pyramid - Having known Doug Farr, author of Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature through participation in his LEED ND sessions at Congress for the New Urbanism congresses for 4-5 years, having followed him via the LEED ND Correspondence Committee, I thought I knew much of what Farr had to offer. Make no mistake, I considered him a thought leader. I helped to found a Sustainable Urbanism Ratings Group in Portland, Oregon to help Farr improve LEED ND. I have espoused the 2030 Communities Campaign he founded both within CNU and in the larger world for the last two years now.

But it took hearing that there was a Biophilia chapter for me to push my local library to buy this rather expensive book. After all, I have been prompting CNU designers to design utilizing ecosystem services for the 6-7 years that I have been active in CNU. I needed to see who my soul mates are and connect with them.

Sustainable Urbanism integrated many threads that were sometimes divergent or confusing for me. It gave me a better historical perspective and showed me where we are in a continuum. As an underemployed planner, it gave me the assurance I need to believe that my skills will be needed well into the future. It gave me a wealth of sound bites and quotes that I will use in my blog articles, public testimonies and other advocacy for progressive policy. It reinvigorated the boldness that comes with certainty and reinforced my commitment to sustainable urbanism.

To begin with the basics, there were four parts to the book:

* The Case for Sustainable Urbanism
* Implementing Sustainable Urbanism
* Emerging Thresholds of Sustainable Urbanism
* Case Studies in Sustainable Urbanism

It was Farr's own writing in Part One--and in a smattering of the headings in Parts Two and Three--that I found most insightful, most pithy and perhaps most controversial within New Urbanism. For example, in Chapter 2 (p. 49) he states In order to strengthen human interdependence with natural systems, sustainable urbanism believes that human settlements need to be designed to make resource flows visible and experiential. . . Sustainable urbanism embraces the interweaving of riparian and wildlife corridors between and through neighborhoods. In Chapter 8 (p. 169) he states Filtering stormwater, even in high-density urban locations, is an important aim of sustainable urbanism.

I loved Farr's moments of unexpected optimism about the immense task ahead of turning around America's development pattern. For example, he writes regarding Gen X (p. 53)

As taxpaying voters presented with a bill for the full cost of the gloomy consequences of the prior generation's wrong course on the built environment, they are also likely to embrace urbanism. . . .Given that this same pattern of land use that is cooking the planet is also contributing to the obesity epidemic, land-wasting low-density development, social isolation, heightened levels of pollution, higher taxes, and a shortened lifespan, it is hard to imagine that sustainable urbanism will not come to occupy the center of Gen X policy and governance.

After railing against land use laws that make LEED ND and sustainable urbanism illegal in many places, he offers this opinion (p. 59):

In light of the well-documented links between sprawl and the potential for shortened life spans, obesity, and accelerated threats to the Earth, a comprehensive plan that enables sprawl should, in the near future, run afoul of the law. With a growing awareness of how auto-dependent land use can be hostile to human well-being, in just a few years sustainable urbanist plans may be the law of the land.

For me there were a couple of irritating aspects to the book as well. While the lovely green color used throughout the book was aesthetically pleasing, when used in 6pt font, the light color made it difficult for me to read the timelines and sidebars interspersed through each chapter. I also felt that many of the subchapters were too short to be satisfying. Farr Associates own diagram on The Sustainable Corridor at the beginning of Chapter 6 Sustainable Corridors is crammed into a single page (p. 113) while the page next to it is mostly blank except for a chapter title--with adherence to style trumping readability. And in Chapter 9, The 2030 Community Challenge: Economic Growth with Sustainable Urbanism p. 204 Farr says nothing about the economic growth one might anticipate from the title!

I found the chapter on Biophilia to be missing something--though it was partially offset by the subchapter on Biodiversity Corridors in Chapter 6. But even that piece assumed that designers reading this book know the difference between using diverse native plant species and alien ornamentals to create a habitat patch. For the most part they don't.

Despite my minor complaints, I would give this book five stars and recommend it highly to others in professions involving the built environment as well as community activists seeking to adapt their communities for climate change and peak oil. After all, as Farr says in his Epilogue (p. 296) Sustainable urbanism, against enormous odds, requires the improbable: that the base of the pyramid--millions of us--"get it" and act in concert. . . What this book calls for is something that no one person can effect--a change in our political culture.

I am encouraged that the base of the pyramid may be waking up by reading that the citizens of Beaerton, OR are calling for a vibrant downtown to be created out of the sprawled array of car sales lots and disjointed strip commercial. "The City is looking for a consultant with international experience and acclaim in order to bring a cachet previously unseen in Beaverton that will excite the community to the possibilities of what the City may become in the future."

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
New Urbanist Cheer Leasder - I was a bit put off that Mr. Farr would subtitle his book after Ian McHargh's Design With Nature and then proceed to launch an attack on McHargh's book and built work. This attack was baseless and misrepresented McHargh's text. It seems to me then rather than acknowledging that "New Urbanism" is no more than the capitalist manifestation of an idea that McHargh had years ago, they attempt to rewrite history and downplay the fact that McHargh invented the very foundation of what they base their "new" theories. Quite simply, determining where to build and where not to build is the essence of "green" design. Suggesting that McHargh did not consider "society" is ridiculous and belies a lack of a basic understanding not only of his work but of ecology. Ecology deals with interaction: man is part of nature, and our intellect, values, and use of the planet are not and can never be outside of the planet itself. It seems as though the New Urbanists and still do not get that basic tenant of ecological design.

Through their blatant hubris and jealousy, it is fitting that New Urbanists should steal the title and then openly attack McHargh because it mirrors what they are doing to his work. Ignorance, hypocrisy and revisionist interpretation does not a "new" idea make.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
One of the best academic urban design books out there. - I'm a UNLV Landscape architect student (4th yr) and this book has been used as one of the text books for two classes so far, design studio, and urban land use. The concepts all relate to sustaining our planets resources and lowering our urban footprint. It presents the concepts from historical, present and future view. It has many illustrations,and is a terrific reference book.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Truly useful tool for my trade - Every once in awhile you find a book that becomes a new favorite. That happened recently with the arrival in our Livable Communities Coalition offices of this fabulous book by Doug Farr. Not long after receiving and beginning to read it, I had the pleasure of facilitating a workshop for the development of a "sustainability element" for the master plan for an intown Atlanta neighborhood. We are now organizing the outcome of that workshop for consideration by the neighborhood and the city. It feels as though Farr has handed me the answers to a final exam before I have to take the test.

Farr's book combines passionate, compelling arguments for design reform with more than 100 pages of short essays. The essays explain how to implement sustainable urbanism and present case studies to illustrate his points. The book has given me a logical framework for organizing and connecting concepts and recommendations. And with just the right amount of detail - enough to get the point across, with where to go if you need more.

Reduced to its most basic tenets, Farr's sustainable urbanism is walkable and transit-served urbanism integrated with high-performing buildings and infrastructure. As Farr puts it, high-performing infrastructure is an emerging field that combines many strains of reform: smart growth concerns about the financial burden imposed by new infrastructure for greenfield development; the New Urbanist's desire for humane, pedestrian-scaled infrastructure design; and the green building movement's focus on resource "greening" and consumption efficiencies.

If smart growth, sustainable development or healthy communities interest you, and especially if you also work in the nonprofit or for-profit arenas for these causes, buy and read this book, and buy another and pass it on.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
The Missing Link - Doug Farr shows a comprehensive understanding of sustainability rarely seen in this movement. Too often different professions work on greening their product in isolation. While they may be doing wonderful designs they are not linking with other elements and professions to make these improvements complimentary and exponential. A LEED Platinum building built on farm land miles from the city center is not a comprehensive solution (and should really not be able to get a platinum rating.) Mr. Farr shows how to create an integrated approach to building where the "green" structure is consciously tied into the communities' transportation, utilities, culture, and work life creating a truly sustainable environment. Every public official and city planner should read this book.

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