No comments about The Power of Ideas: Five People Who Changed the Urban Landscape.

No comments about Dimensions of Sustainability.

No comments about Urban Design: Green Dimensions, Second Edition.

No comments about Robert Saliba: Beirut City Center Recovery.

No comments about Preserving And Enhancing Communities: A Guide for Citizens, Planners, And Policymakers.

1 comments about Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back.

1. The unique contribution of this book is its methodology in analyzing urbanization and global change as part of one system, but consisting of different scales/levels. While numerous books have concentrated on globalization and its impacts on the sustainable city, this one emphasizes interdisciplinarity and makes the technical understandable to everyone regardless of academic background .
   
   Edited by 2 world known experts, the Director of the Human Settlements Program of the International Institute of Environment and Development in London and a Research Fellow of the United Nations University in Japan, this book is a seminal work utilizing systems theory in analyzing relationships between drivers of global change, actors, and responses at various levels and their respective feedbacks. The title says it : ``From local to global AND BACK''. The chapters, written by various professors and experts, deal with environmental challenges and guide the reader through the entire system. The 2 editors are also the lead authors of the chapter on Urban Sytems of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. Hence, you must read this book if your attention was caught by their urban systems chapter in the MA.
   
   The book discusses details and concrete cases in developing countries mentioned in ``Urban Sytems'' and offers fresh findings. Their diagram alone on integrated assessment of Urban Systems, which includes Actors, Responses, Upstream Drivers and Downstream Impacts, is a valuable contribution to academics, systems analysts, and reseachers who want to understand the dynamics of global change at every scale and as a whole. It is helpful as well to those engaged in Strategic Environmental Assessments, but whose backgrounds are confined to one discipline. This book will help you.
   
   It is indispensable to scholarly understanding of systems dynamics in this age of global environmental change without having to use the much used and abused ``ecosystems approach'' alone nor having to study at MIT to understand causal loops, stocks and flows, which Professor Forster was talking about but not knowing how to apply it to the real world which needs concrete policy solutions. This book makes it understandable to everyone without having to go through the technical jargon.
   
   Having come from multiple backgrounds myself, I am grateful that a book FINALLY and correctly shows the methodology of how interdisciplinarity is valuable in understanding sustainable development. I particularly appreciate the incorporation of ecosystem impacts at one level, economic impacts at another level, and health and community impacts at another level. There is no one level of impacts in working for sustainable development. At last ! This book got it right.
   
   It does not omit the concept of ecosystems at a specific scale when discussing social impacts. Perhaps other authors omit it because they cant explain it. It reminds the reader that the goal of sustainable development is not only the sustainable city, but a sustainable world.
   
   Very thorough research all over. Truly a gathering of experts. Highly impressed with the correct synthesis of approaches towards the sustainable development goal.

No comments about Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life.

No comments about Open City: Alphabet City 6.

No comments about Place Identity, Participation and Planning (Rtpi Library Series).

No comments about Master Plan Process For Parks And Recreation.