Customer Reviews

Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide

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This is the 2nd edition of a volume first published in 2005, which itself was one of the early books on an all important 21st century topic. The 2nd edition provides important updates in a rapidly emerging set of studies and recommendations to respond to and prepare for climate change. The risks of climate change are presented in a series of chapters, with full citation and references, with titles such as "How Hot Will It Get" and "How Wet Will It Get," each presenting summaries and citations from the science literature. The authors are wise enough to not only describe risk, but also to describe practical and realizable actions that can be taken to reduce climate risks, particularly related to buildings, communities and city building. There is a critique of "modern buildings" and description of proven techniques to use renewable energies in building and urban design. Concluding Chapters focus upon strategies and targets for action, in which all of us should be engaged. The book's broad brush makes the case for comprehensive approaches to design for mitigation and adaption realizable through the built environment. The emphasis on the physical environment makes this especially valuable as a text for teaching and practicing architecture and related physical planning professionals.

Every American planning professional or aspiring city planner should include this book in their personal library. Besides the fight against standard American-style sprawl, planners are going to have to take the long view (it's why they're hired!) when designing buildings, cities, energy supplies, and transport systems in a much warmer world. This book is a start. In my opinion, any school that fails to include plannning aspects of climate change in its curriculum is derelict.
As you can see from my other book reviews I harp on the need to examine nuclear energy as an option for our quickly urbanizing world. Besides good coverage of alternative energy for buildings and cities, the authors mention the aging UK nuke plants, the problem of relying on French nuclear power during the last heat wave, and other issues, including Sweden's policy reversal on shutting down its nuclear program. But this assessment on p 278 stood out for me:
"However with the approaching oil crisis the UK govt may well have to review this (nuclear) policy. It is difficult to see how we will cope without nuclear power."
Whether the UK will modernize its nuclear infrastructure is another matter.

How will we live when the oil runs out? How will we live when the climate is even hotter, with more floods, high winds, droughts? What kinds of buildings will be livable? How can we change what we build now to better serve humankind? Sue Roaf and co-authors argue that we won't be able to do it in "thin-skinned", windowless twentieth century buildings of glass and steel that keep out neither cold nor heat and require tremendous energy resources just to be usable. This is a great book about the many ways in which we need to and can change our thinking--particularly in architecture, in which a slavish adulation of "maestro-built," difficult-to-use buildings must be abandoned for a commitment to buildings and communities that will protect, preserve and comfort us in the resource-scarce times ahead.