Aryana Libris

Author : Coyle Stephen
Title : Sustainable and resilient communities A comprehensive action plan for towns, cities, and regions
Year : 2011

Link download : Coyle_Stephen_-_Sustainable_and_resilient_communities.zip

Foreword. THIS BOOK IS NOT a silver bullet. It does not offer the magic shot that cannot miss—and for that we must be grateful. Steve Coyle takes urbanism very seriously indeed. He and his colleagues do not underestimate the patient and skillful work that must be done to recover our lost cities and their dismal suburbs, and by so doing salvage what remains of our natural areas. It is the distinct absence of shortcuts that gives me confi dence that the advice provided here will actually be effective. The lifestyle of the American middle class—how we occupy our land, how we circulate, and how large we live—defi es easy solutions. We endure brutal commutes and drive even short distances. To buy petroleum we have effectively shoveled overseas the accumulated wealth of three centuries, the only permanent result being the impoverishment of our citizens and the polluting of our environment. We have mitigated for the absence of neighborhood and public realm by building retirement villages and Disney Worlds. What good are silver bullets against this monstrous stupidity? Despite generous allocations of hope, money and political will, most cities and their surrounding countryside have declined. Conventional wisdom assumes causes that range from misgovernment to disinvestment, inattention, and incapacity for vision to just plain bad luck. Not so! Generations of professional consultants offered their very inventive ideas and too often, alas, their plans were implemented. Recent American planning is not the conventional historiography of a sequence of planners intelligent proposals that were tragically ignored. Actually, it consists of the dutiful implementation of their simpleminded recommendations. The people and the government did their job—it was the planners who failed them. To explain my aversion to any simplistic proposal, it is enough to list the catastrophic sequence of ideas that has constituted remedial urbanism for the past seven decades. Most of these have proven to be either duds mercifully forgotten or spectacular backfi res, the consequences of which are still quite visibly undermining our society. ...