Sustainable Urban Design an environmental approach

Adam Ritchie and Randall Thomas are the authors of sustainable urban design book. Adam Ritchie is a physician holds a double bachelor degree in applied physics from Denis Detroit and York universities. Worked as a partner for Max Fordham LLP for 15 years as sustainable team leader and know is director of Ritchie and Daffin practice in London for engineering service design. He holds various certificates of professionalism from applied physics registration bodies. Randall Thomas is a professor in architectural science in Kingston University since 2005. He holds an engineering degree and a PhD in the field. Worked in Max Fordham as an engineering consultant and he has various registration certificates from several professional bodies such as charted engineering council.

Many readers of this publishing house realize clearly that the books they publish are for students, whether they are at undergraduate or graduate levels. It serves mainly graduate architects if they are looking for sustainability general concepts for buildings. Adding to that several urban design concepts for outdoor sustainable solutions such as landscape planting and its relation to CO2 reduction. Other engineering disciplines related to building design, such as mechanical and electrical, may as well benefit from this book, but from an architectural perspective. The book does not include any calculation base for most of the sustainability concepts application on buildings.

The book is oriented towards BREEAM building accreditation and its application in building design in the UK. The authors focused on the building design, starting from general concepts of urban design for community and its relation to transport and type of catchments. Walkability in urban design centered on UK projects. The key feature of the book is how to reduce demand for building design and its impact on sustainability and accreditation. Reducing external water use for landscape and water use for internal building activities. The proper use of sustainable materials inside the building and outside it. Taking advantage of natural powers such as daylight and wind in the building design as general concepts.

The author here does not deny in many areas in the introduction that the book is just to inspire rather to be prescriptive. General ideas run through the book. He hints that urban design to be sustainable must consider context, which is part of the urban design process. He wants our cities to be environmentally sustainable, and he repeats this couple of times in the introduction by identifying what makes cities sustainable, like landscape, transport, energy supply, and managing waste. Cities to become greener, to protect wild habitat and to protect the ecosystem. The book provides the tools and techniques used to solve the issues affecting the sustainable urban design explained in the case studies.  

The book is a combination of academic content and professional practice content. Through all the chapters, the writers introduced ideas and concepts related to BREEAM green system used in UK. As well as related to the USA LEED green building system. Though these presented ideas are merely concepts, in practice one cannot use them in the accreditation process because they lack calculation procedure. The authors supply in several areas in the book tables of thumb rule that could be used to simplify and show the presented ideas more clearly. As for academic content, the authors supply many references for further reading and to get wider information about the discussed subject in the chapter.

For sure, the authors connected all the chapters well, and the reader enjoys the trip of discovering the concepts of the sustainability from the wider scale the city. The writers introduce the sustainability concepts from urban planning and design context to building communities and related transport network. Then, they go through gradually to the green building system ideas of building design and energy saving and reducing waste. Finally, the authors reflect on how design experts negotiated the issues of sustainable urban design in the case studies presented. Throughout the book, the author provides the Up-to-date environment issues from the urban design perspective. The book is very attractive to read because of the way the chapters are presented in terms of the content connection to the relevant images, tables, sketches, diagrams, and info graphs.  

A reader may ask, does the content reflect book title? Yes, since the book is presenting general ideas about the sustainability in urban design. Here, we can argue that the writers considered architecture as urban design and vice versa. The authors wrote the book towards the building systems design in terms of sustainability (green building system). They introduced some general ideas about urban design in the beginning, but still the book only covers architecture issues of sustainability. Nevertheless, the book index defines for the reader the book content clearly and what is going to be discussed in the chapters.

The author in the introduction declared clearly that the book is meant to give the reader whatever his profession guidelines to follow in applying these concepts to work or academy. They supplied the reader with a wide range of references, guidelines, best practices documentations for further use and read. One of the major ones is the CABE guidelines for architecture and urban design. Some other documents come from local authorities in UK like London Plan.

Readers who are looking for a book to understand the general ideas of sustainability would benefit from this book a lot. The book is useful for students of architecture to get a grasp of the sustainability ideas and its application to building design. Students might as well benefit from the book because it introduces the UK green building system BREEAM. The book is also useful for those who graduated and want to understand sustainability applications in practice. The book is a very good reference and very interesting to read because of the variety of images, graphs, sketches, tables, and info graphs. The book is also useful for other engineering disciplines to understand sustainability from the architecture perspective. But, the book is not useful for practitioners because the presented system requires higher knowledge of mechanical and electrical as well as landscape and transport calculations for application.    

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