Planning for Sustainability

by Stephen Wheeler

Existing patterns of urbanization are unsustainable in the long run. Current development practices consume enormous amounts of land and resources, damage local ecosystems, produce pollutants, create huge inequalities between groups of people and undermine local community and quality of life. Unfortunately planning has itself led to many unsustainable development practices.

Planning for Sustainability presents a straightforward, systematic analysis of how more sustainable cities and towns can be brought about. It does so in a highly readable manner that considers in turn each scale of international, national, regional, municipal, neighbourhood, site and building. In the process it illustrates how sustainability initiatives at these different scales interrelate and how an overall framework can be developed for more livable communities.

Genres: Sustainability

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2004

Reviews

[Gede Suprayoga · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the second edition (paperback) of this book, which is the newest edition, published in 2013. This book helps me to understand key factors driven the integration of sustainability concept in planning academia and practices. In this book, Stephen Wheeler traces the concept of sustainability from the very beginning. He puts the concept in the planning context while examining "ingredients" or "requirements" of sustainability planning. From there, he distinguishes approaches in this type of planning from the former. To give a description of contextual central issues, half of the book elaborates the issues in different cases related to land use, housing, economic development, urban design, regional planning, and so on. The scale of the issues is also described to make readers understand that the issues cannot be isolated to a particular area of planning, but working (also interconnected) across different scales.