Sustainability learnt from difference

Abstract

Unprecedented in its scope, Cross-Cultural Urban Design: Global or Local Practice? explores how urban design has responded to recent trends towards global standardisation. Following analysis of its practice in the local domain, the book looks at how urban planning and design should be repositioned for the future. It looks at: population movement; urbanization; suburbanization; tourism; commercialization; environmental degradation; flows of capital. Mapping out how urban practitioners, researchers and educators are currently responding to these issues in their work, this volume presents and discusses cases and theories of urbanism from across the globe. Contributions are framed in three sections: Re-conceptualising the city; presenting ways to read the contemporary city and re-think work within it, Experiments in practice; presenting and discussing case studies where practitioners have confronted new conditions and Learning cross-cultural urban design; presenting and discussing learning as a field of research and its contribution to practice. A unique collection, Cross-cultural Urban Design outlines a new way of thinking about urban design within the complex context of the contemporary world and points a way forward – as a cross-cultural practice that supports and develops sustainability.