BOOK REVIEW
The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook
By Timothy Beatley
It is undoubtedly true, as the authors of this important book argue, that urban design (and planning) today play an outsize role in addressing the intersecting challenges of climate change, resource management (water, energy, land), and conservation of biodiversity. The authors are Nico Larco, a University of Oregon professor who also practices through ELEMENT/Urban Design, and Kaarin Knudson, who also teaches at the U of O and is currently serving as Mayor of Eugene. The pair has written an enormously useful and badly needed handbook to help guide and support those working to design and build the fabric of our communities. They have pulled off a remarkable accomplishment here in marshaling in a single volume a massive amount of information, insight, and urban design guidance, all underpinned by research and tied to the literature, and presented in visually engaging ways.
The book is The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook (Routledge, 2023). The organization of the book is quite novel: its content is organized around five main topics (with color-coded pages to help guide readers to them): Energy Use & Greenhouse Gases, Water, Ecology & Habitat, Energy Use & Production, and Equity & Health (in addition to an Introductory section and an Appendix, containing a helpful glossary and index). Within each larger topic there are more detailed discussions of the design implications at four geographical scales: Region & City, District & Neighborhood, Block & Street, and Project & Parcel.
The book is impressive in its comprehensive coverage. From bicycles to street design to the massing and placement of buildings, there just isn’t much missing here. There are many color photos and maps throughout, and for many of these the authors insert numbers keyed to legend that helps explain what is presented. The book creatively blends together a number of different formats–there is text of course (Introductory sections in standard paragraph form), but also extensive use of bulleted lists and tables, and key terms. There is extensive content in detailed tables throughout the book (e.g. one on street types that provides a clear and precise definition of what constitutes an arterial versus a collector street).
Making connections
Urban designers (and others) reading this book are encouraged to see the whole picture, to think holistically, and to make connections between and across topics (streets, tree canopy, water), and especially to work across scales. The design and flow of the chapters reinforce this important message of integration. There is a lot of helpful cross-referencing throughout the book, and helpful notes in the beginning of each specific urban design element suggesting how that element relates to others in the book At the end of each specific design element the authors provide suggested “Guidelines for Urban Design” (many are general considerations, but a number are quite specific, such as recommended spacing between public transit stops, the diameter of mature trees to protect, and ideal street-to-width ratios). And again there is lots of cross-referencing to other guidelines found in other sections of the book.
Also, at the end of each design element (under a section called “Considerations + Caveats”) there are brief summary comments about how design elements interact, and (good to see) “political issues,” (though typically quite short, I like at least the nod given to the important role politics plays, perhaps not surprising given that one of the coauthors serves as Mayor of Eugene, OR). Decisions about urban design are infused with social, political and ethical dilemmas, from concerns about over-surveillance and loss of privacy, to disagreements about the extent of legitimate government regulation (e.g. whether tree codes should prohibit or curtail the ability to cut down large trees on private property). These many conflicting values, and the politics that surround them, are ever-present in urban design, and while this handbook can’t fully address them, it will certainly help to create a common language and starting point. And the book will undoubtedly elevate the quality of discourse about the kinds of places we want to live in and the practical steps needed to bring them about.
It is important to note what this book is not: it is not so much an urban planning text, for example one that discusses how to write a city’s comprehensive plan or the full range of planning implementation tools a city might employ (though there is a very good discussion of zoning throughout). It’s also not a book about GIS or other commonly used planning analytic tools. It is, however, a book about the shape and form of the city at every scale and the ways that shape and form can help sustain us and the natural world around us. Planners need this book (and will likely benefit even more than architects and designers).
Gaps and surprises
Every book reviewer points out something missing, of course. There were some topics a bit underemphasized. There was only one mention of “biophilic” in the index (a helpful framing for me) and alarmingly no index entry for “birds,” though I did discover some brief discussion of birds in several places (and very happy to see the mention of Doug Tallamy’s research on the importance of native trees in sustaining bird populations, though perhaps a missed opportunity to advocate for bird-safe buildings and glass). On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised to see detailed discussions of some topics that (in my experience) urban designers often overlook or underemphasize, especially designing for nonhuman life more broadly (for example, detailed discussions of ecological networks, microhabitats, vertical complexity, and design of wildlife passages). Overall, the ecological content and coverage is outstanding so there is really little for this environmental planner to complain about.
On using a big book
I did find myself wondering how most readers would end up using or accessing this book. It is a relatively large book–-oversized and more than 400 pages in length and fairly heavy (the paperback weighing in at a little under 4 lbs). So this is not like a small volume of Mary Oliver poetry that you easily stuff in your backpack and take on a hike or carry with you to read under a tree. Perhaps it stays lodged in a prominent location at the office. And this is probably not a book one reads cover-to-cover.
I think the benefit to the structure of the book is that readers can choose to read an entire topical section, say Equity & Health, or they can dip in and out as needed, sampling more specific design topics when necessary. And its size, length and overall heft in turn highlights another positive of this book: its relative affordability. Routledge books can sometimes be expensive (spoken as an author of several). This extremely visually- and content-rich book sells for a relatively low retail price compared with other much shorter books with fewer if any color plates. This is a book that provides exceptional value for money.
The authors are clear to state in the beginning of the book that it is not meant to replace more detailed or in depth subject area content: rather it is the comprehensive breadth that shines and as the authors say “allows designers, planners and community members to see the range of urban design elements that they should address, to understand how these elements relate to other concerns, identify what co-benefits are present, and realize how multiple objectives can be accomplished within the same effort.” The book does all this exceedingly well, showing readers the broad universe of considerations that should ideally go into and ought to be kept in mind in creating sustainable communities. Larco and Knudson have provided a great benefit for the urban design world by drawing together these often-disparate design factors and showing how they fit together.
Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia where he has taught for more than thirty years.