What is Green Urbanism? Holistic Principles to Transform Cities for Sustainability

This book chapter first looks at the timeline of important publications on sustainable design that emerged from different schools of thought, and how gradually the notion of Green Urbanism evolved.It then identifies the intertwined principles for achieving Green Urbanism and gives guidance for topics of further research in the field. Different schools of thought: From green city to green buildingOver the last thirty-five years or so, an international debate on eco-city theory has emerged and has developed as a relevant research field concerning the future of urbanism and the city itself.During that time, a number of architectural schools of thought have been implemented worldwide.One such school is Technical Utopianism (a technological idealism that relied on the quick `techno-fix', as expressed, for instance, in the work of Archigram).Other early writing on green urbanism was available from Ebenezer Howard, whose 1902 book was entitled `Garden City of Tomorrow', and whose political and social agenda has recently made a comeback.Much later, in 1969, Reyner Banham pioneered the idea that technology, human needs and environmental concerns should be considered an integral part of architecture.Probably no historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering and services on the design of buildings.(Howard, 1902;Banham, 1969) Some other early significant writing on green urbanism has come from Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs -although they didn't call it green urbanism.From `Silent Spring' (by Rachel Carson, 1962), to Victor Olgyay's `Design with Climate' (1963), to Reyner Banham's `Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment' (1969), to Ian McHarg's `Design with Nature' (1969), to the pivotal publications by authors re-connecting urbanism with the climatic condition (such as Koenigsberger, Drew and Fry, or Szokolay, in publications in the 1970s and 80s), to the remarkable `Brundtland Report' (Brundtland, 1987); the important contributions from Robert and Brenda Vale (`Green Architecture: Design for an Energyconscious Future ', 1991), and the `Solar City Charter' (Herzog et al, 1995(Herzog et al, /2007)), the field of sustainable city theories and climate-responsive urbanism has constantly been expanded.An important contribution came from Guenther Moewes with his book `Weder Huetten noch Palaeste' (1995), which is a programmatic manifesto for designing and constructing www.intechopen.comClimate Change -Research and Technology for Adaptation and Mitigation 244 longer-lasting buildings.More recent theories for `Compact Cities' and `Solar Cities' (Burton, 1997; Jenks and Burgess, 2000;Lehmann, 2005) encapsulate the visions based on the belief that urban revitalization and the future of the city can only be achieved through `recompacting' and using clearly formulated sustainable urban design principles.These principles for achieving green urbanism have to be clearly defined and adjusted to an era of rapid urbanization, especially in the Asia-Pacific Region.In the 21st century we are working in an entirely new context, for which we need new types of cities.As noted by Ulrich Beck, we have arrived in `a new era of uncertainty', where energy, water and food supply are critical.'We live in a world of increasingly non-calculable uncertainty that we create with the same speed of its technological developments.'(Beck, 2000) In 1972, the Club of Rome formulated, in its study 'Limits of Growth', the negative effect of sprawl and over-consumption of resources.Today, we know that uncontrolled development is a damaging exercise, and that urban growth should occur in existing city areas rather than on greenfield sites.Portland (Oregon, USA) was well ahead of most other cities when, in the early 1980s, it introduced a legally binding 'growth boundary' to stop sprawl and the emptying-out of its downtown area.`Today, younger people don't desire to live in the endless suburbs anymore, but have started to re-orientate themselves back to the city core, mainly for lifestyle reasons.' (Fishman, 1987) However, as several recent studies of inner-city lifestyles reveal, an increase in consumption can be part of the inner-city renaissance, which often enlarges the ecological footprint of the urban dweller (e.g. research by the Universities of Vancouver and Sydney on the effect of higher population density and increase in lifestyle gadgets owned by urban dwellers).At the end of the 20th century, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mexico-City, Mumbai, Calcutta, Shanghai and Beijing have grown to become endless urban landscapes.They are new types of megacities, which express an impossibility of orderly planning and strategic regulation.In his 1994 essay, Rem Koolhaas rightly asked `What ever happened to urbanism?'.In 2000, the term `Climate Change' has been getting widely introduced.We find emerging Green Urbanism theory for the 21st century, which aims to transform existing cities from fragmentation to compaction.Eco-city theory focuses on adjusting the relationship between city and nature.

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