Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A comprehensive action plan for towns, cities and regions

The ultimate step-by-step action plan guidebook for making communities resilient, resourceful, and healthy

Many of today's communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-being in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies, rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient. Sustainable and Resilient Communities delineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems—transportation, energy, water, natural environment, food production, solid waste, and economics—through:

• Methods for assessing a community's key sustainability quotient

• Deploying tools for establishing timely performance goals and metrics

• Developing strategies for evaluating, selecting, and implementing 'high-leverage' interventions

• Activating policies, codes, programs, plans, and practices, as well as monitoring and upgrading their performance

The book includes a range of targeted case studies, from New Orleans and South Carolina to Arizona and California, illustrating geographically diverse approaches for urban contexts large and small.

A resource for developing an ecological urbanism, Sustainable and Resilient Communities employs time-proven, broadly applicable strategies and actions that can be customized for specific environmental, energy, and economic conditions.