Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code: Guidelines for Sustainable Land Development (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design)

Book Description

Sustainable land development strategies based on scientific information

Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code offers a pioneering method to develop sites in harmony with natural processes that is solidly based on peer-reviewed scientific findings. While the LAND Code can be readily used in conjunction with LEED, EPA, and other guidelines, it features several unique characteristics, including:

Recommendations based on peer-reviewed scientific research
Rating scheme that weights each development and land use practice based on its environmental benefit and difficulty of implementation
Straightforward, step-by-step system that is accessible to non-experts
Focus on land rather than buildings
Extensive use of photographs and diagrams to illustrate practices and procedures

After an introduction, the book begins with chapters covering water, soil, air, living resources, energy, and materials. Throughout these chapters, the authors recommend tested and proven strategies that minimize disruption of the natural processes. Each chapter provides background, describes benefits for both developers and ecosystems, and recommends protective strategies in simple, non-technical language (a glossary is provided explaining all terms not in common usage). A toolbox of environmental engineering methods to implement the strategies follows, and the final chapter of the book provides a series of examples of actual development projects in which a variety of approaches have successfully attained sustainable development. With its emphasis on scientific understanding, the LAND Code offers you the information needed to make and implement decisions for ecologically sound land development.

Customer Reviews:

every developer should be given a copy of this book.......2007-08-04

Balmori and Benoit are visionaries on the all-important issue of land development. Their commonsensical approach should guide the behavior of all land policy people--real estate agents, bankers, regional and local zoning commissions AND developers. Doing the "green" thing is cheaper and better, always.

Growing Greener: Putting Conservation Into Local Plans And Ordinances

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Growing Greener: Putting Conservation Into Local Plans And Ordinances
Randall G. Arendt
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Conservation | Environment | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Conservation Design for Subdivisions: A Practical Guide To Creating Open Space Networks
The Regional City
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
Rural by Design: Maintaining Small Town Character
Practical Ecology for Planners, Developers, and Citizens

ASIN: 1559637420

Book Description

Growing Greener is an illustrated workbook that presents a new look at designing subdivisions while preserving green space and creating open space networks. Randall Arendt explains how to design residential developments that maximize land conservation without reducing overall building density, thus avoiding the political and legal problems often associated with "down-zoning."

The author offers a three-pronged strategy for shaping growth around a community's special natural and cultural features, demonstrating ways of establishing or modifying the municipal comprehensive plan, zoning ordinance, and subdivision ordinance to include a strong conservation focus. Open space protection becomes the central organizing principle for new residential development, and the open space that is protected is laid out to form an interconnected system of protected lands running across a community.

The book offers:

detailed information on how to conduct a community resource inventory
a four-step approach to designing conservation subdivisions
extensive model language for comprehensive plans, subdivision ordinances, and zoning ordinances
illustrated design principles for hamlets, villages, and traditional small town neighborhoods

In addition, Growing Greener includes eleven case studies of actual conservation developments in nine states, and two exercises suitable for group participation. Case studies include: Ringfield, Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania; The Fields of St. Croix, City of Lake Elmo, Minnesota; Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, Illinois; The Meadows at Dolly Gordon Brook, York, Maine; Farmcolony, Standsville, Virginia; The Ranch at Roaring Fork, Carbondale, Colorado; and others.

Book Description

This publication shows how land tenure laws, decentralization policies, institutional capacity building, common property management, conflict resolution and participatory development can be made more responsive to the needs of those practicing transhumance today, or pastoralists, for ecologically and economically sustainable development in arid Africa. The case studies cover social, economic, political and environmental issues. Scientists, students, development experts, government officials and development organizations will find the research highly relevant.

Tomorrow by Design: A Regional Design Process for Sustainability (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design)

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The answer to urban sprawl's challenge!

Tomorrow by Design: A Regional Design Process for Sustainability (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design)
Philip H., Jr. Lewis
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0471109355

Book Description

This book is the first comprehensive publication on the regional design process, and how it can be applied to regions ranging in scale from a small neighborhood to the entire planet. It provides a methodology for guiding development in a manner that preserves and enhances natural diversity and the quality of life for present and future generations.

Customer Reviews:

The answer to urban sprawl's challenge!.......2001-01-11

This is a great book to read for anyone who is concerned with rampant, poorly planned suburban growth in the United States. Mr. Lewis's 23 Circle Cities plan and his Regional Design Process provide the answer to most of our conservation and environmental problems.

Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities

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Case studies of overdevelopment, with some wishful thinking about community involvement
A feel-good land use/planning guide
Balancing economics and the environment
An excellent resource

Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities
Jim Howe , Edward T. McMahon , and Luther Propst
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Development & Growth | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization
Living and Working in Paradise: Why Housing Is Too Expensive and What Communities Can Do About It
Project Manager's Spotlight on Risk Management (Project Managers Spotlight)
Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate Ski Industry Is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns, and the Environment
Event Entertainment and Production (Wiley Event Management Series)

ASIN: 1559635452

Book Description

Increasing numbers of Americans are fleeing cities and suburbs for the small towns and open spaces that surround national and state parks, wildlife refuges, historic sites, and other public lands. With their scenic beauty and high quality of life, these "gateway communities" have become a magnet for those looking to escape the congestion and fast tempo of contemporary American society.

Yet without savvy planning, gateway communities could easily meet the same fate as the suburban communities that were the promised land of an earlier generation. This volume can help prevent that from happening.

The authors offer practical and proven lessons on how residents of gateway communities can protect their community's identity while stimulating a healthy economy and safeguarding nearby natural and historic resources. They describe economic development strategies, land-use planning processes, and conservation tools that communities from all over the country have found effective. Each strategy or process is explained with specific examples, and numerous profiles and case studies clearly demonstrate how different communities have coped with the challenges of growth and development. Among the cities profiled are Boulder, Colorado; Townsend and Pittman Center Tennessee; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Tyrrell County, North Carolina; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Sanibel Island, Florida; Calvert County, Maryland; Tuscon, Arizona; and Mount Desert Island, Maine.

Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities provides important lessons in how to preserve the character and integrity of communities and landscapes without sacrificing local economic well-being. It is an important resource for planners, developers, local officials, and concerned citizens working to retain the high quality of life and natural beauty of these cities and towns.

Customer Reviews:

Case studies of overdevelopment, with some wishful thinking about community involvement.......2006-06-12

As the title suggests, this book addresses the challenges of gateway communities, defined as communities next to a national park, national forest, or national wildlife refuge. These communities are growing very rapidly, which risks damaging the natural resources that attract people there in the first place. The book emphasizes the problems that these communities face, and does not really address the effects on the resources (despite what the title might imply).

The analysis presents pretty standard stuff. They discuss economic growth and the trade-offs with quality of life, as well as the economic problems of a one-dimensional economy built on tourism. More than half the book consists of case studies from around the country. These case studies yield lessons about the importance of involving the local community, developing a vision for the community, getting information about the community's existing resources, building on local assets, and working with the adjacent parks as well as with non-governmental organizations. Conspicuous in their absence are the possibilities of working with business, state government, or adjacent communities.

I'm pretty skeptical of the kinds of solutions offered in this book. For example, the authors believe that community involvement in development is a panacea. I'm sure that it *can* help - - but such proposals can also create a situation in which outsiders (such as our authors) parachute into a community and act as if they know better than the locals. Remember, the growth wouldn't be happening in the first place unless many people in the community wanted it. An outsider trying to encourage community involvement in managing growth will probably have allies, but will also spark opposition from the people making money from growth.

Getting people involved can also surprise you. An urban planner friend of mine working with a depressed town was surprised when the local community wanted strip malls and fast food joints, which was not at all what she had in mind. From the standpoint of protecting natural resources, the community may well be part of the problem.

One might also quibble with the cases. For example, I was surprised to see Boulder presented as a success story, since I would view it as a failure. It's depressingly overdeveloped, looks like Anytown California, and its "successful" restrictions on further growth have simply caused that growth to spill over into its neighbors. This spillover makes existing traffic problems worse, as people drive from place to place.

In fact, the authors prefer to ignore the fact that limiting growth in one community often leads to the same undesirable growth happening next door instead. That may be good for the original community, but it's hardly good policy for a region or state.

Criticisms aside, the book has quite a bit of information about the challenges faced by the communities that they studied. It doesn't have so much information about the challenges in the nation as a whole; this is a book of case studies. It's a decent place to start when thinking about these problems.

A feel-good land use/planning guide.......1999-05-13

- A feel-good land use/planning guide produced by the Conservation Fund and the Sonoran Institute. Examples show how communities can work together to protect parks and environmental refuges..

Balancing economics and the environment.......1999-03-27

National parks and other public lands are big, fragile, economic engines for nearby gateway communities. In this book, communities and near-by public lands sometimes play nice together. The authors conclude: " . . . successful communities have transcended the 'growth versus no-growth' wars that characterize land-use policy in many cities and towns."

An excellent resource.......1998-07-10

Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities is a must read for anyone who still believes that environmentalism and economic development are fundamentally opposed propositions. This book of case studies and analysis describes several successful ways in which communities created new jobs and economic opportunities while celebrating and protecting, rather than exploiting, their area's natural resources.

Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning From Village Homes

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Sustainable Communities

Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning From Village Homes
Michael Corbett , and Judy Corbett
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Village Homes: A Community By Design (Case Studies Land Community Design)
Urban Open Space: Designing For User Needs (Case Studies Land Community Design)
Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities
Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities
Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods

ASIN: 1559636866

Customer Reviews:

Sustainable Communities.......2000-04-03

Judy and Michael Corbett have written a brief and thoughtful, not to mention well-informed book on the subject of designing and building sustainable communities. The various chapters on the history of their subject, on their seminal and justifiably respected community in Davis, CA, and on elements of the planning process and the integration of real estate pragmatics with environmental ideals will serve as both a user-friendly introduction for lay readers and a handy reference for professionals looking to expand their horizons. The writing is clear and uncomplicated, the design of the book is simple and straightforward, and there is the nice sense throughout that it has been put together by people who know wherof they speak. One complaint: it's unclear why a paperback published by a non-academic press would be priced a bit high but it is unfortunate, as it will serve to prevent this book from reaching the broader audience it deserves.

Average customer rating:

Blue Revolution
Ian Calder
Manufacturer: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Sustainable Development | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Natural Resources | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Regional Planning | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1844072398

Book Description

This update to Blue Revolution provides further evidence of the need to integrate land management decisionmaking into the process of integrated water resources management. It presents the key issues involved in finding the balance between the competing demands for land and water: for food and other forms of economic production, for sustaining livelihoods, and for conservation, amenity, recreation, and the requirements of the environment. It also advocates the means and methodologies for addressing them.

A new chapter, Policies, Power and Perversity, describes the perverse outcomes that can result from present, often myth-based, land and water policies which do not consider these land and water interactions. New research and case studies involving ILWRM concepts are presented for the Panama Canal catchments and in relation to afforestation proposals for the U.K. Midlands.

Land-use Planning For Sustainable Development (SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT)

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Must read this book, must read it!!

Land-use Planning For Sustainable Development (SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT)
Jane Silberstein
Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Community Planning: An Introduction To The Comprehensive Plan
Environmental Land Use Planning and Management
Urban Land Use Planning, Fifth Edition
The Nepa Reference Guide
Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (7th Edition)

ASIN: 1566703255

Book Description

Is the doomsday scenario inevitable? With our increasingly diminishing natural habitat and other natural resources, it seems that we are headed in that direction. After centuries of patchwork land planning, out-of-scale development and cookbook methods, it is clear that we need a better way. Authors Silberstein and Maser explore a different scenario in Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development. The authors review the foundations of current land use practices from historical, constitutional, economic, ecological, and societal perspectives. They analyze the results of these practices and suggest alternative methods for guiding, directing, and controlling the ways in which we modify the landscape. They make the case that we-as humans-have the capacity for community with all life and can ultimately embrace the notion that individual well-being is wrapped up in the well-being of the whole, and that social change can occur before major disasters require it. This is the first book to incorporate land-use planning with sustainability. The authors offer a perspective that opens a range of possibilities for changing current methods. They tackle the difficult dilemma of creating consensus among people-tapping the powers of mind, intuition, and experience in developing a sustainable community. Using sustainability as a framework, Silberstein and Maser present the underlying concepts of sustainable land-use planning. With Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development, you will discover an array of ideas for modifying conventional planning for and regulation of the development of land.

Customer Reviews:

Must read this book, must read it!!.......2001-01-12

Silberstein and Maser have written a must-read book for anyone interested in local community-planning with a definite sustainability twist. I read it for a paper on sustainable participation and found it to be quite easy to read; plenty of case examples and thought-provoking ideas make sure of that. I especially liked reading about the everyday problems that are so common in community-planning, it makes it easy to relate to. I rate it a four, since I'm saving the five for a fantastic book yet to come...

Measuring Landscapes: A Planner's Handbook

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Measuring Landscapes: A Planner's Handbook
Andre Botequilha Leitao , Joseph Miller , Jack Ahern , and Kevin McGarigal
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Landscape | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Corridor Ecology: The Science and Practice of Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation
Green Infrastructure: Linking Landscapes and Communities
Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change: An Ecological and Conservation Synthesis
Key Topics in Landscape Ecology (Cambridge Studies in Landscape Ecology)
Biodiversity Planning and Design: Sustainable Practices

ASIN: 1559638990

Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence

Average customer rating:

An excellent book for city researchers
Its all here...
Excellent
Gridlock and bypasses are not the only options.
A must-read for concerned citizens in the 21st century.

Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence
Peter Newman , and Jeffrey Kenworthy
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Traffic & Safety | Automotive | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Carfree Cities
The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry
The New Transit Town: Best Practices In Transit-Oriented Development
Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use (RFF Press)
The Regional City

ASIN: 1559636602

Book Description

Sustainability and Cities examines the urban aspect of sustainability issues, arguing that cities are a necessary focus for that global agenda. The authors make the case that the essential character of a city's land use results from how it manages its transportation, and that only by reducing our automobile dependence will we be able to successfully accomodate all elements of the sustainability agenda.

The book begins with chapters that set forth the notion of sustainability and how it applies to cities and automobile dependence. The authors consider the changing urban economy in the information age, and describe the extent of automobile dependence worldwide. They provide an updated survey of global cities that examines a range of sustainability factors and indicators, and, using a series of case studies, demonstrate how cities around the world are overcoming the problem of automobile dependence. They also examine the connections among transporation and other issues-including water use and cycling, waste management, greening the urban landscape, and more-and explain how all elements of sustainability can be managed simultaneously.

The authors end with a consideration of how professional planners can promote the sustainability agenda, and the ethical base needed to ensure that this critical set of issues is taken seriously in the world's cities.

Sustainability and Cities will serve as a source of both learning and inspiration for those seeking to create more sustainable cities, and is an important book for practitioners, researchers, and students in the fields of planning, geography, and public policy.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent book for city researchers.......2005-08-31

This book presents a right track of understanding and solving the problems of today cities.

Its all here..........2005-07-10

This excellent book will give you the insight to understand how transportation and cities interact.

Excellent.......2000-03-15

This book has provided a clear insight on sustainable transport strategies and policies which have been adopted in different countries. It is very well explained and I must say that it is the best piece the authors have actually written. It amalgamates the previous work carried out by the authors and therefore is an excellent reference book, which should be present in every transport planner's shelf and in every university.

Gridlock and bypasses are not the only options........1999-11-02

In "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" written in the 1960s Jane Jacobs embraced complexity as a goal in itself. "How" she asked "can cities generate enough mixture among uses, enough diversity throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilisation?" For Newman and Kenworthy the key idea is sustainability - "one of the most diversely applied concepts among academics and professionals discussing the future..." that "...has cut across all disciplines and professions and has developed many complexities." The car enters Newman and Kenworthy's consideration as a technology of widening individual choice. Why then is the car not the transport technology, par excellence? What unintended consequence has meant its proliferation has blighted the very thing it might have been expected to nurture?

Newman and Kenworthy argue that the car, unlike public transport, offered people who could afford it freedom to live anywhere in a city and get quickly to any other part of it. It appeared to remove the need to plan land-use. Anything could be built anywhere with drivers determining their own routes to and from home to work, shops, schools and entertainment. In the "car-city" - which Newman and Kenworthy distinguish from the "pedestrian city" and the "transit city" - it is possible to develop in any direction and not just along rivers, tramlines or railways. Dispersed low density housing becomes accessible and popular. Town planners can separate residential from industrial zones accelerating decentralisation. Public and commercial buildings no longer need to cluster as a product of the convergence of private and public investment in a particular place. Public transport constricted by timetables and fixed routes becomes second class travel.

Where the car city has been taken to extremes as in Newman and Kenworthy's intellectual territory - America and Australia - the penny dropped soonest. The social consequences that attended driving people off streets and creating boundaries round parks, squares, promenades, pavements - which had served as milieu for human interaction - only began to be widely accepted quite recently. Only now is a wedge of new economic logic being driven between the car and its enduring connection with the good life.

The car, once it ceased to be an indulgence of the rich, always represented a balance between liberation and dependency. Today, the choices promised by cars are linked transparently to those they take away. Everyone knows about exhaust emissions and most drivers, outside of advertisements, experience worsening road conditions. There is growing despondency among those who would like to use their cars less. They realise alternatives won't work unless people switch in large numbers to other ways of getting around. But the public space needed to take to the streets to walk or cycle and take trains and buses is unavailable. Many see public space as hazardous for themselves, and perilous for their children. Deprivations long imposed on people without cars apply, with increasing force, to people with them. New technology may reduce vehicle emissions. It cannot recover the enormous interaction space taken out of circulation by road traffic. Before that lost social space can become available for people outside cars, a legal and moral space has to be reclaimed.

This is why the idea of sustainability is slowly and surely turning into a value. It is the big idea which legitimates unpopular regulation. It offers space for the entrepreneurs of the future, exciting third world policy makers who want to leap a stage in the industrial revolutions of the richer nations. It is the idea around which people are ready to form alliances that go beyond their interests; a concept which "did not come so much from academic discussion as from a global political process." Newman and Kenworthy speak of their book being "many years in preparation", a book that is a "combination of text book and life story" deriving from work with city governments and voluntary groups attempting to address a major global and local issue of how people "can simultaneously reduce their impact on earth while improving their quality of life".

This books aims to show how a city's use of land determines and is determined by its dominant forms of transport. It describes how policies aimed at creating sustainable relationships between humans and their environment necessarily revolve around a city's land-use-transport formula. Getting this right is a prerequisite for urban renaissance.

What makes this book of especial value and its focus provocative is that so many cities and towns are now "auto-dependent". Because cars are sold on the basis of the freedoms they offer, policies to regulate so dominant a form of transport, even when those freedoms are nurtured in the imagination rather than available in the material world, arouse strong protest. Attempts to diversify people's transport choices are regularly characterised as restrictive and even oppressive. Instead of being seen as a catalyst for wealth production, governments addressing challenges to the reputation and wealth of cities caused by "auto-dependence" are seen as depriving large numbers of citizens of fundamental freedoms. The "motorist" has become a late 20th century everyman, affected from all angles by policies to restore a balance in cities between space allocated to rapid movement and space where citizens can engage in civil exchange.

This book is a mine of arguments, backed by statistics, illustrations and graphs. Readers concerned about global warming may be disappointed to find no thinking about the impact of air transport on the sustainability of cities. Officials and politicians thinking of purchasing this text may ask whether it arrays anti-car prejudices against a "normal paradigm" of improving cars and roads and a friendlier planning regime for building of homes and businesses on green field sites. For Newman and Kenworthy that argument is over. Their book is primarily for those who seek to understand the implications of a paradigm which doesn't treat gridlocks or bypasses as the only options.

A must-read for concerned citizens in the 21st century........1999-05-04

A must-read for city planners, environmentalists, urban policymakers, and all those generally concerned with "smart growth," sustainability and a vision for the 21st century. Newman and Kenworthy make a clear case for the rethinking of our current pattern of development and why it just doesn't make sense. They offer an alternative pattern that is not only achievable, but attractive. Their study of global cities throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia is clear and conclusive. And their vision is inspiring. American cities are making their comeback based on many of the principles expressed here. Read this book and share it with all those you know!

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