Designing Sustainable Urban Futures

Cities have great potential to become sustainable habitats. Challenges, concepts and approaches along the way are described in an anthology edited by researchers of ITAS and the Florida Institute of Technology.

Cities are known as huge energy consumers, producers of greenhouse gases and waste, as anonymous places of coexistence marked by segregation, with masses of cars and people moving around. The book "Designing Sustainable Urban Futures – Concepts and Practices from Different Countries" looks at urban spaces from a completely different perspective. It argues that many cities of the 21st century, despite social and environmental problems, have great potential to offer its residents a jointly used and resource efficient habitat.

The authors of the anthology discuss concepts and alternative approaches to sustainability-oriented cities from the perspective of various disciplines. With contributions from Europe, Asia and the US, they demonstrate the diversity of contexts and challenges for designing sustainable habitats. It becomes evident that cities are particularly worth living in if they combine multifunctional structures, a well-integrated transport infrastructure and democratic urban development processes.

A key finding of the publication is that sustainable city futures require a strong focus on human needs, environment and health as well as the joint design of creative spaces for sustainable practices. What such a space might look like is shown in the contribution on the Karlsruhe real laboratory District Future – Urban Lab. Other contributions analyze, among other things, the potential of cohousing for community-based and ecological district development as well as the transformation of existing structures to compact and community-based living arrangements for older people.

The recently published book is based on contributions to the international symposium on "Sustainable Urban Development at Different Scales", organized by ITAS in cooperation with the Florida Institute of Technology and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 2014. (31.10.2016)

Bibliographic data

Albiez, Marius; Banse, Gerhard; Lindeman, Kenyon C.; Quint, Alexandra (eds.)
Designing Sustainable Urban Futures. Concepts and Practices from Different Countries. Karlsruhe: KIT Publishing 2016
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