Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions

Article Type: Books and resources From: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Volume 12, Issue 4

Stephen J. Coyle,Wiley,Chichester,2011,US$69,30,416 pp.,ISBN 0470536470

Many of today’s communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-beings in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies,rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient.

Sustainable and Resilient Communities delineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems – transportation, energy, water, natural environment, food production, solid waste, and economics – through:

• 1.

  Methods for assessing a community’s key sustainability quotient.

• 2.

  Deploying tools for establishing timely performance goals and metrics.

• 3.

  Developing strategies for evaluating, selecting, and implementing “high-leverage”interventions.

• 4.

  Activating policies, codes, programs, plans, and practices, as well as monitoring and upgrading their performance.

The book includes a range of targeted case studies, from New Orleans and South Carolina to Arizona and California, illustrating geographically diverse approaches for urban contexts large and small.