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The Agile City

Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

In a very short time America has realized that global warming poses real challenges to the nation's future. The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it?

Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming-and blunt its effects-by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly.
Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero. These cuts can be affordably achieved in the windshield-shattering heat of the desert and the bone-chilling cold of the north. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. Agility, Russell argues, also means learning to adapt to the effects of climate change, which means redesigning the obsolete ways real estate is financed; housing subsidies are distributed; transportation is provided; and water is obtained, distributed and disposed of. These engines of growth have become increasingly more dysfunctional both economically and environmentally.

The Agile City highlights tactics that create multiplier effects, which means that ecologically driven change can shore-up economic opportunity, can make more productive workplaces, and can help revive neglected communities. Being able to look at multiple effects and multiple benefits of political choices and private investments is essential to assuring wealth and well-being in the future. Green, Russell writes, grows the future.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 4, 2011
      In this enlightening if somewhat dry analysis of climate-conscious land use and development in the U.S., Russell, architecture columnist for Bloomberg News, shows how current policies and lending systems that encourage urban sprawl and car-based transportation are rooted in an old political conflict. The "Jeffersonian reluctance to constrict owners in their use of land" struggles with Alexander Hamilton's view that a centralized state is required in a world of increasing urbanization, "large scale industry... and an international banking system." Citing numerous examples of environmentally innovative, attractively livable development in Canada, the Netherlands, and other countries where planning authorities revive blighted areas and prepare for weather extremes, Russell conveys a frustration with the American impatience with city planning and distrust of government that have resulted in traffic-jammed urban sprawl and high living costs. He laments how innovations such as, in post-Katrina New Orleans, intensive planning sessions including all stakeholders as well as low-energy, hurricane-resistant housing developments founder through political timidity and government's financial neglect. Russell offers numerous solutions and recommends we focus the "kind of design acumen and analytical prowess" regularly invested in biotech and electronics on developing "citymaking models that take into account evolving business needs, residential diversity, and diverse natural systems, too."

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  • English

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