Sustainable Urban Planning

When the first edition of this book was published in 2012, the term “sustainability” seemed rather long in the tooth or even overcome. Occasionally, there were comments that the “sustainable city” was passé, whereas the “resilient city” was the next big thing, the objective of “resilience” encompassing the topic of sustainability. And indeed, all too frequently, the term “sustainable” was bandied about – often wrongly – in every conceivable and inconceivable context.

Nevertheless, there was great demand for the book in all its complexity, and it sold out after about three years. The revised and updated second edition is now available. We have restructured the content, added current topics such as urban digitalisation, and streamlined the overall volume.

During the first half of the decade, much in German society, economy, and policy pointed to a paradigm shift towards greater sustainability. After decades of conflict and occasionally fractious dispute, the impact of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in 2011 led even conservative politicians to turn away from established energy policy and engage in the so-called “energy turnaround.” Seen from abroad, Germany appeared to take the lead in the field of sustainability, admired or belittled, depending on the point of view.

A few years down the line, things look different again. Germany’s nuclear exit has been a major milestone towards environmentally friendly and safe energy production, but it has failed to contribute to an improved CO₂ balance. Increasingly, German cities have had to tackle new challenges, such as extreme precipitation or fine particle pollution from increasing motor traffic. It has become evident that alternative means of energy production (vast photovoltaic plants, enormous windmills, corridors of high-voltage power transmission, retention basins, eco-fuel monocultures, etc.) impact heavily on cities and villages, nature and landscape, often giving rise to civic protest.

This all bears direct witness to the multidimensional nature of the sustainability principle and the need to better analyse reciprocity and “side effects,” and work across disciplines to develop holistic planning approaches which go beyond one-dimensional improvements.

This book focuses on urban planning. As the key socio-spatial unit of everyday life and the spatial level of intervention in urban development, the neighbourhood lies at the heart of its regard. Given that many aspects cannot be confined to clear spatial sub-entities within the city, the field of view extends from the neighbourhood to the entire city or even the region, whilst also homing in on the building scale in some cases.

Irrespective of the outlook and dimension of analysis – environmental, sociocultural, or economic – the discourse always centres on the sequence of the human habitat’s processes, and the urban or rural space within which they take place. Even in an absence of economic and technological change, humans would age, new generations arrive, buildings and technical systems would wear away, plants would thrive and die in successive sequence.

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