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Frequently the site of crisis or turmoil, individual cities can be fragile environments. For the first time in history, however, the future of the entire urban system is being thrown into doubt. Catastrophic climate changes threaten the life support of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of urban dwellers around the world. Supplies of fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas, are declining worldwide. Modern cities not only depend on petroleum products for their power, but also for their goods and services - including the making and packaging of virtually all food. How might this precarious global condition be turned around? How can the energy infrastructure of cities, towns and rural settlements be restructured, to confront the environmental challenges of our time? Could a new, positive global vision emerge out of the impending, massive shift from unsustainable fuels to a renewable energy base?
Opening with a definition of renewable power, the book concisely sets out the fundamental logic and philisophical framework of the urban energy revolution. It then progresses to look at how cities best attempt adaptation to accelerating, anthropogenic climate change: by mitigating it and fighting its root causes. Two central chapters map the spatial implications of the urban renewable energy transformation and the new technologies that might be involved in successfully creating the renewable city. The guide not only compares different approaches to creating renewable cities, but also examines various sustainable building assessment and design tools. The volume concludes with an easy-to-use best-practice template for local governments and planners, applying lessons from advanced cities around the world.
The Renewable City: A comprehensive guide to an urban revolution. 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.
The Renewable City: A comprehensive guide to an urban revolution 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.
About the Author
Peter Droege is an expert on the role of renewable energy within the fields of urban design, development and urban infrastructure. He has directed and developed Solar City, a research development effort conducted under the auspices of the International Energy Agency. Droege has performed academic roles at major universities in the United States and Japan, and is presently holding professional positions at the Universities of Newcastle, Australia and Beijing, China. He is a Chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy, For Asia Pacific, and directs Epolis, a Sydney-based consultancy active in sustainable urban change worldwide. |
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