(Eds) Mark Hewitt and Susannah Hagan
City Fights: debates on urban sustainability is a book which follows on from a symposium on energy and urban strategies. This brought together a wide variety of disclipines with the aim of developing sharp ideas about making better and more sustainable cities in environmental, social and economic terms.
City Fights is a collection of articles around the central theme. The authors represent a spectrum of disciplines including engineers, architects, designers, urban planners, sociologists, economists.
The subjects covered by this small volume include: testing and modelling: the metabolism of cities; and poliltics and planning: winning hearts and minds.
One article looks at emerging city shapes: energy at the urban scale. This is jointly written by Mark Hewitt of University of North London school of Architectural & Interior Design, and Andrew Ford of Fulcrum Consulting. The article gives a brief look at a project being carried out into sharing the joint skills of architect and engineer to progress towards sustainable cities.
One particularly interesting aspect of the book is that contributors are international. It is fascinating to note the very different views of sustainability from different countries. In the book's introduction, the editors point out that this was also noticable at the symposium: "To the British, the term sustainability meant innovation, change and commitment to the future, and to the Austrians stasis, conservatism and fear of the future. The British present thus wanted to be identified with the term, while the Austrians wanted to put as much clear blue water as possible between it and them."
The editors of City Fights are Mark Hewitt and Susannah Hagan. Hewitt is a partner in the practice d-squared design. He is a lecturer at the University of North London, runing a post graduate design unit focusing on energy and microclimate. Hagan runs the MA Architecture: sustainability and energy graduate programme at the Architectural Association.
Source
Building Sustainable Design
