Product Description
Despite the intolerable costs of climate change and inevitably declining oil, natural gas and uranium reserves, the vast majority of cities and urban communities are planned and managed as if such existential crises did not exist. Hence the transition from fossil fuel dominated cities to an urban future marked by a radically new, renewable energy infrastructure requires entirely new tools and frames of decision-making.

This is an original guide to an entirely unprecedented urban transformation, to cities and towns powered by renewable energy. Squarely focused on action, it supports design, planning and management decisions and serves as a practical guide to practitioners, academics and political leaders in communities and cities worldwide, as a useful and well-structured reference text. It is built on the most successful of past and present urban sustainability trends and emerging infrastructure directions, presenting renewable energy applications as offering new and inevitable approaches to urban infrastructure planning and the design of cities.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 2 reviews)

Planning for a nonlinear future

This book asks the relevant questions for today's urban and regional planning and is a rich resource for answers. The following excerpt from page 70 summarizes the approach:

Present climate change may appear slow to some, but many of its effects are felt increasingly directly. Global-warming triggered events have become more violent and prevalent. Local, state or national leadership can no longer afford to wait for so-called *threshold events* to change policy in a crisis response (Glantz 2005). Cities and their communities are critical and integral elements of global and national economic systems: everything is at stake. Leading decisionmakers and communities alike must not harbour any illusions about an easily projected, linear future, nor about being able to successfully adapt incrementally or in an *ad hoc*, unplanned fashion. Climate change has progressed to such an extent that urban futures are likely to be discontinuous. This risk is clear, present and sizeable, creating powerful incentives to secure sustainable means of urban adaptation and mitigation. But while both cooredinated and autonomous action at global, national, state and local level is called for, it is only slowly forthcoming and insufficiently proclaimed as a global imperative.

June 30, 2007

Cityscape's Review of The Renewable city

The Renewable City - A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution - Peter Droege - Wiley Academy 2006 - ISBN: 0470019263 - Paperback and ISBN: 0470019255 Hardback.

The author combines an encyclopaedic knowledge with a lucid writing style that places this book in the Meadows, Carsons and Lovins class as one who can turn around mindsets but also provide a vision ahead.

he author states that it is a guidebook on three major urban efficiency issues as in reforming wasteful forms of mobility and transport; reducing stationary energy consumption and achieving urban thermal improvements by design. It is also a book for a revolution in the making. The problem is to solve the use of oil, gas and coal employed in an extremely short lived moment in history, but with today's global urban civilization almost entirely dependent upon it, and with its immense attendant security, sustainability and health problems. This is an enormous task of undoing several generations of planning priorities arising out of eras gripped by visions of limitless growth and fossil fuel energy availability.

Clearly, in the sphere of planning, energy must return to centre stage to fully gain the pre-eminentposition it deserves, but the adoption of renewable and efficient infrastructure and not the counting of emissions, is the end goal of Renewable City planning. The key to success is to disaggregate long-term aims into operational tangible goals.

This book is a magnificent resource for students, practitioners and concerned citizens. It belongs on one's desk as a constant reference source and, in these times, not on the shelves.
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April 02, 2007

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