Book description
The need to find new approaches to the development of cities is
becoming increasingly urgent in this age of continuing population
growth, demographic transition, climate change, fossil fuel peak and
biodiversity losses. Restoring ecosystem services and promoting
biodiversity is essential to sustainable development - even in the built environment.
Ecosystem Services come to Town: greening cities by working with
nature demonstrates how to make urban environments greener. It
starts by explaining how, by mimicking nature and deliberately
creating habitats to provide ecosystem services, cities can become
more efficient and more pleasant to live in. The history of cities
and city planning is covered with the impacts of industrial urban
development described, as well as the contemporary concerns of
biodiversity loss, peak oil and climate change.
The later sections offer solutions to the challenges of sustainable
urban development by describing and explaining a whole range of
approaches and interventions, beginning at the regional scale with
strategic green infrastructure, looking at districts and precincts,
with trees, parks and rain gardens and ending with single buildings,
including with green roofs and living walls.
Technical enough to be valuable to practitioners but still readable
and inspirational, this guide demonstrates to town planners, urban
designers, architects, engineers, landscape architects how to make
cities more liveable.
Gary Grant
is a Chartered Environmentalist, Member of the Institute of Ecology and
Environmental Management, an Academician at the Academy of Urbanism,
Member of the All Party Parliamentary Committee on Biodiversity, thesis
supervisor at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University
College London, Chair of the Judges of the Integrated Habitats Design
Competition and Director of the Green Roof Consultancy Ltd. As director
of EDAW and then AECOM Design + Planning and now independent, he has
worked on large scale planning projects including the London 2012
Olympic Park, the Bedford Valley River Park, the Whitehill-Bordon Eco
Town, Education City, Qatar and Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi.
