Conservation for Cities: How to Plan & Build Natural Infrastructure

by Robert I. McDonald

It's time to think differently about cities and nature. Understanding how to better connect our cities with the benefits nature provides will be increasingly important as people migrate to cities and flourish in them. All this urban growth, along with challenges of adapting to climate change, will require a new approach to infrastructure if we're going to be successful. Yet guidance on how to plan and implement projects to protect or restore natural infrastructure is often hard to come by.

With Conservation for Cities , Robert McDonald offers a comprehensive framework for maintaining and strengthening the supporting bonds between cities and nature through innovative infrastructure projects. After presenting a broad approach to incorporating natural infrastructure priorities into urban planning, he focuses each following chapter on a specific ecosystem service. He describes a wide variety of benefits, and helps practitioners answer fundamental What are the best ecosystem services to enhance in a particular city or neighborhood? How might planners best combine green and grey infrastructure to solve problems facing a city? What are the regulatory and policy tools that can help fund and implement projects? Finally, McDonald explains how to develop a cost-effective mix of grey and green infrastructure and offers targeted advice on quantifying the benefits.

Written by one of The Nature Conservancy's lead scientists on cities and natural infrastructure, Conservation for Cities is a book that ecologists, planners, and landscape architects will turn to again and again as they plan and implement a wide variety of projects.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2015

Reviews

[Always Pouting · Rating 3 out of 5]

I personally don't know much about sustainability and city planning but I picked up this book because why not, one can always learn something new. I did learn a lot of things I didn't know from this, like the creation of man made wetlands, which was pretty cool. Also I never really thought about many of the things mentioned in the book as being needed to accounted for when planning cities but they seemed so obvious once I read about them that I was kind of like why have I never considered this before. The problem for me was that this book was written with a much more practical agenda than to educate people. The book was written to help people who actually work in infrastructure planning as a guide to help them make more sustainable decisions when planning, and so I found a lot of the finer details boring. It also felt kind of obvious to me when the author goes on about dealing with the more bureaucratic side of planning, but things like that always feel obvious until one is under pressure to remember them and actually act on them. So I wouldn't say this book would be interesting to someone who just wants to learn more about the subject but as far as reviews go from people who actually work in the field they seem to have found it useful.

[Milly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I throughly enjoyed this book. Not only is the book beautifully written for a non-fiction book, it was also very enjoyable. I found the text to be engaging and to have a logical structure with chapters following on to each other. Despite having, what I consider to be a large web of confusion where politics, economics, urban planning, environmental processes and nature combined, McDonald made it appear easy to solve the problems the world's cities are facing.

This book was also incredibly useful to a number of professions. This book would be a great edition to a number of professionals book shelves (from planning, design, conversation and environmental management etc) with excellent practical ideas and starting points to get projects of the ground. I really liked that this book also mentioned how important it is to monitor the progress of the project, highlighting the importance of keeping the momentum going. Despite being good for professionals, speaking as a student of environmental science and planning, I found this book to be highly accessible to my own knowledge and is quickly becoming a 'go-to' book within my studies. Similarly, if you just had an interest in this topic I wouldn't hesitate to recommend as it combines theory and practical applications in a simple yet effective way.

This book was given to me to review on Netgalley.com from the publishers however all thoughts are my own.

[Ellen Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a great book, tackling how green infrastructure and "ecosystem services" could be better brought into the planning of urban areas to improve and solve many of the issues facing large cities today. I liked how each chapter tackled a different ecosystem function - stormwater, shade, etc. - and began with a lovely down-to-earth example of where it has worked well. It was a well-thought-out solution for urban planners/sustainable development practitioners providing a nice sciencey-bit in the middle before rounding off each chapter with practical suggestions for moving forward.

My only reservation is that - while it was very accessible - it lacked the pure mastery of David MacKay's "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" which is to me the best science book I've ever read because it actually offers practical policy solutions to issues and I was hoping for more of this from this book. That said, maybe this was a little outside the scope of this book. I would also have liked more pictures of green infrastructure but I did read an advance copy from netgalley so those may come in future editions! I thought the problem of climate change was dealt with, but could have been elaborated on a little more...

Thanks to the publisher and author for allowing me access to a copy via netgalley. I really enjoyed it!

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

McDonald tries to look at the various offerings of "Ecosystem Services" and find ways to quantify them in a utilitarian view (akin to what most economists try to do ~ as an aside, Hedonic modeling: represent!) to encourage for their protection and expansion in the ever-growing urbanization of Terra.

One of the things that I found particularly unique in this text was his frequent reference to "resiliency" ~ which as an emergency preparedness / management wonk, is directly in my field. As we know, flooding is the most common natural disaster and oft the most deadly, so finding ways to mitigate massive amounts of runoff leading to flash flooding and increasing water uptake into the ecosystem rather than trying to deal with it through overtaxed 'grey' infrastructure is of great interest to me professionally.

There were a lot of good points about how to create coalitions to jointly fund projects by highlighting the common / complementary goals of each organization / stakeholder group that could be achieved through cooperation and implementation of projects.

Highlighting this text as an item for future reference.

[Genie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book looking at environmental conservation of cities. Very practical, providing lots of information about ,ensuring and modeling various kinds of natural.systems in cities, including types of software available to do so.