Resilient Cities and Green Urbanism : Setting the New Planning Agenda

Abstract

Peter Newman is a renowned Australian academic and planner who invented the term ‘automobile dependence’ to describe how we have created cities where we have to drive everywhere. For 30 years since he attended Stanford University during the first oil crisis he has been warning cities about preparing for peak oil. Peter has published over 200 refereed papers and many books. His book with Jeff Kenworthy ‘Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence’ was launched in the White House in 1999 and his latest book is ‘Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems’ (publisher Island Press). He was the first Australian author invited to contribute a chapter in the Worldwatch Institute’s annual State of the World publication – the 2007 edition being on cities. Peter is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he is best known for his work in reviving and extending the city’s rail system. In 2001-3 Peter directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was the first state sustainability strategy in the world. In 2004-5 he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney advising the NSW government on planning issues. In 2006/7 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville and he returned there in early 2008 as Harry Porter Visiting Professor. Timothy Beatley is Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last eighteen years. His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He has published extensively in these areas, including the following recent books: Ethical Land Use (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Habitat Conservation Planning: Endangered Species and Urban Growth (University of Texas Press, 1994), Natural Hazard Mitigation (Island Press, 1999, with David Godschalk and others); and An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management (Island Press, 2002, Second Edition, with David Brower and Anna Schwab).