Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities

by Michael Eliason

Picture a beautiful, green neighborhood where most of your needs could be met by walking, rolling, or accessing transit. There is a diversity of housing types with abundant affordable and middle-income options. Schools, services, and pedestrianized streets make the neighborhood family friendly. As cities turn brownfields into green fields and look to maximize public investment in transit and infrastructure, ecodistricts are the answer. Eliason shows that this type of affordable, climate-adaptive living option is possible anywhere.    

 

In Building for People, architect and ecodistrict planner Michael Eliason makes the case for low-carbon ecodistricts and presents tools for developing these residential and mixed-use quarters or neighborhoods. Drawing from his experience working in Europe and North America, he shows the potential for new climate-adaptive ecodistricts that directly and equitably address our housing shortages while simultaneously planning for climate change. Eliason explains that to create highly livable places with a low carbon impact, ecodistricts must incorporate ample social housing for a good economic and social mix of residents, invest in open space, create infrastructure that can adapt to a changing climate, and offer car-free or car-light realms.  He also looks at how public health, livability, climate adaptation, and quality of life are interconnected.

 

Full-color photos and illustrations show what is possible in ecodistricts around the world, drawing heavily from examples in German cities.

 

Building for People shows professionals involved in regulating, planning, or designing our communities that high-quality, low-carbon living is within reach.

 

Genres: Urban Planning, Nonfiction, Urbanism, Architecture

222 pages, Paperback

Published December 12, 2024

Reviews

[Kiziah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have complicated feelings about this book. Eliason has wonderful ideas and if we could live in his ideal world, I think it would be amazing. However so much stands in the way to actually achieving these goals (in the U.S. and Canada), and in the meantime we have so many people to house!! And what might be beneficial for the long term (completely circular building materials that can be composted at the end of the building’s life cycle), is just going to make it that much harder to build right now because it’s going to require increased regulations and cost on developers. Like, I still think it’s a good idea that townhouses should be built even if they’re kinda bland and not super close to a park, because the alternative in the US is a SINGLE FAMILY HOUSE AND MORE SPRAWL.

Therefore, I appreciate this book more as a guide to the ideal than as completely realistic for the US right now. But I do agree that we should be absolutely working towards a lot of these things for the betterment of public health, climate change, community, and more.

[Zack Subin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book may be best used as a reference rather than reading straight through. It shines in the chapters where the author has been a design leader, such as single-stair / point-access blocks or passivhaus. Elsewhere, it reads as a giant list of prerequisites that good design "should" have with insufficient attempt at persuasion or discussion of tradeoffs (a pet peeve I have with the field in general).

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has been engaged in housing and sustainability for quite some time, this book was a great access point to unify concepts which have been floating around my head for some time. Not a shallow exploration that I felt too familiar with and unintrigued, not a tech-laden tome that felt impenetrable, the book mixes views, ideas, terms, links, and visions very well, to help build a framework populated with enough markers that one can feel ready to seek answers in the world. Inspiring and engaging, I hope this book finds its way into the hands of more politicians, advocacy oriented folks, longstanding industry professionals, and many curious hands, wondering what a better future could look like, if we would only open our eyes to the opportunities long since calling us from elsewhere in the world, ready to make every kind of house a home, for the long haul.

[Robert Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got fired up reading this book for a future of livable and affordable cities. Wonderful portrayal of what cities and towns could be if we expanded our imagination. Hope we must aspire and hold to in our local communities in these dark times

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

an incredibly dense and valuable toolkit. there’s so much to know abt how legislation has bound our development, and the lifelong impacts we’ll suffer bc of it unless some great changes are made. housing bc2

[Kyle Barker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great high level overview of strategies to create better housing at the building and district scale.

[Christopher Higham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should be required reading for US planners and policy makers. Some of the concepts seem completely foreign to me as a US-based suburbanite, but they are high-impact and could easily be implemented with some political will.

There are some problems, mainly brushing over or not adequately addressing trade-offs. The most egregious example that I identified was the case for mass timber districts in chapter 18. There was no mention of the risk of fires on districts built primarily of wood. If anything, the author suggests that wooden ecodistricts are safer, because old growth forests are thinned through extraction for construction. If these mass-timber developments are safer because fires from electrical malfunctions occur less frequently, that needs to be stated - it's not. As it stands, the author pretends that urban fire in wooden developments isn't a threat. At best, it's a major oversight. At worst, implementing these recommendations at scale might result in countless deaths.

Another small critique is that the scope of this book could have easily included a chapter on land use. Vienna architecture is great and should be replicated in cities everywhere, but greater density in cities could easily surpass all other recommendations combined, at least in terms of climate impact. Eliason touches on land use a little when discussing arterial roads and lumber harvesting in forests. Land use as an alternative to auto-centric development is pretty straightforward and could have been covered with a few images and some text and would have greatly enhanced the overall message of the book without distracting from the architectural considerations.