Description
The health of our planet and our selves depends on how we plan, design, and construct the world between our buildings. Our increasing dependence on fossil fuels over the last century has given us unprecedented individual mobility and comfort, but the consequences are clear. Climate change, sprawl, and reliance on foreign oil are just a few of the challenges we face in designing new — and adapting existing — communities to be greener.
Based on the National Building Museum's Green Community exhibition, this book is a collection of thought-provoking essays that illuminate the connections among personal health, community health, and our planet's health. Green Community brings together diverse experts, each of whom has a unique approach to sustainable planning, design, politics, and construction.
Click here for interviews with some of the contributors.
Table of Contents
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Table of Contents for Green Community
Foreword
Chase W. Rynd and W. Paul Farmer, FAICP
CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION
Funder's Introduction
The Home Depot Foundation
Curator's Introduction
Susan Piedmont-Palladino
THE GREEN COMMUNITY IN CONTEXT
The Sustainable City: A Mythical Beast?
Sir Peter Hall
DENSITY AND TRANSPORTATION
Round, Round, Get Around: Reducing Transportation Burdens in the Green Community
F. Kaid Benfield
Introduction to Connectivity
Fred Hansen
Creating the Planning and Infrastructure Framework for Mixed Use Mixed Income Transit-Oriented and Urban-Infill Development
Jonathan Rose
Sustainable Megapolitan: How Large-Scale Urban Development Can Help Green America
Robert E. Lang and Mariela Alfonzo
LOCAL HEALTH AND GLOBAL HEALTH
Green Communities and the Redefining of Community Wealth
Timothy Beatley
Finding Common Ground: Historic Preservation and Green Building
Richard Moe, with Patrice Frey
Managing Development to Create Sustainable Communities>/b>
Douglas R. Porter, FAICP
ENERGY AND RESOURCES
Energy and Communities
William Browning
Energy and Community Greening
Thomas L. Daniels
The Spillover Effects of Growing Crops for Biofuels
Scott A. Malcolm and Marcel Aillery
Green Infrastructure for Blue Urban Watersheds
Mary Rickel Pelletier
Local Sustainable Energy Sources
Erica Heller, AICP, and Mark Heller, AICP
Healthy Communities, Green Communities
Howard Frumkin
Atlantic Station
Climate Change and Public Health
James A. LaGro Jr.
Toward Sitopia
Carolyn Steel
Food and Community Greening
Thomas L. Daniels
The Impact of the Built Environment on Health-The Brain's Stress Response and the Brain-Immune Connection: Implications for Health Care and Urban Design
Esther M. Sternberg
CONCLUSION
Conclusion
Representative Earl Blumenauer
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Index
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Reviews
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"Today, more than any time in history, we live in a global economy where quality of place drives the free flow of capital. And as the lines between urban, suburban, and rural challenges blur, from poverty to housing affordability, strong neighborhoods are increasingly becoming a yardstick with which we measure America's success. Green Community is a definitive work on the sustainability challenge, offering us a blueprint for integrated transportation, housing, and land-use development and catalyzing a new generation of metropolitan and rural decision making that builds a geography of opportunity for every American."
Shaun Donovan
Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
"Green Community is a rich, fact-filled, and up-to-date collection of today's critical environmental issues and
how to deal with them. It is invaluable."
Roberta Brandes Gratz
Author of The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way and Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown
"Green Community is a thoughtful, provocative collection of essays that explore a dizzying range of concepts that are contained in that elusive phrase "green community." These timely essays vitally inform us-poised as we are on the cusp of what will likely be generational changes in our global economy, in how we provide the energy we need, in how we travel, and in our ideas about what constitutes "the good life" in our neighborhoods, towns, cities,
and suburbs around the world."
Harriet Tregoning
Cofounder and former director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, former secretary of the Maryland Department of Planning, and cofounder of the Smart Growth Network
Congressional representatives, architects, preservationists, economists, environmentalists, and academics, all very
successful in their fields, have contributed essays to this book jointly edited by Piedmont-Palladino of the National
Building Museum and Mennel of the American Planning Association. Divided into four thematic sections on
transportation, preservation, energy, and health, this book ties a multitude of traditional liberal issues under an urban
planning agenda. Contributors, all proponents of the green perspective, attempt in the aggregate to define
sustainability in urban design. An example of the difficulties these advocates encounter is the management of urban
sprawl and the control of population density. However, essay authors avoid many issues and major alternatives. For
example, the energy section does not mention waste-to-energy plants. Beautifully illustrated with handsome graphs
on thick high-quality paper, this book is ready for the museum gift shop yet has academic value as some essays are
well documented and provide additional reading lists. Other graphically displayed data are not cited. This collection
of essays provides an excellent introduction to some basic urban planning concepts such as transit-orientated
development (known as TOO). Summing Up: Recommended.
Aug. 2010 issue of CHOICE
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