Ecopolis: Cities and the Ecology of Civilization

Humans are now an urban species. Our city building is terraforming the planet and setting up development trajectories that challenge whether our civilization and we as a species are 'sustainable' not just decades or even centuries into the future but rather for millennia or even millions of years. To achieve sustainability we need to ask ourselves critical questions: Have we hardwired an inevitable failure into our future through the development, planning and building of our cities? What does the history of human urbanization and city-making tell us about the future? What are the ecological limits that we face? How do we imagine the very different futures for cities and humanity? How can we make sustainability work in cities? On an epic scale, this book provides a systematic overview of the field of urban sustainability from the past, through the present and into the near and distant future. It integrates aspects of public policy, design & technology and economics, while framing current ecological problems in relation to very long-term processes of ecological and social development. Elaborating the roots of sustainable urbanism in antecedent visions of 'the good city', the book includes comprehensive treatments of both Anglo-American and European approaches to urbanism, along with more recent perspectives associated with urbanisation in the global south. Concepts such as the ecological footprint and urban metabolism are elaborated alongside a detailed treatment of issues such as urban form, transportation, and food provisioning systems. With examples from leading practitioners and firms, the detailed overview of current innovations in architecture and urban design prepares the way for a discussion of the long term implications of ecological redesign. Combining perspectives from contemporary futurology and science fiction, the final chapters allow the reader a glimpse of the eco-cities of the far future.Ecopolis is the most epic and wide-ranging book available on cities and sustainability.