Urbanism for a Difficult Future: Practical Responses to the Climate Crisis

Urbanism for a Difficult Future: Practical Responses to the Climate Crisis is a much-needed guide to launching the next generation of land use planning and urbanism that will enable us to adapt to and survive the consequences of climate change.

The book offers strong, straightforward measures for creating a landscape of resilience via pockets of self-sufficiencies. It demonstrates how to secure systems that sustain life (energy, water, food, waste, and production of essential goods) as well as political and social protocols enabling agile decision-making in managing these systems effectively at local levels. It also provides the design principles for creating a built environment that will enable the kind of localization we need for adaptation. The book explores how it is possible to create a life that does not depend on large-scale regional sustenance systems which are likely to be disrupted or fail.

This book uncovers how to enable people to be creative, productive, and supportive at local levels, so that we can achieve strong and diverse local economies that can sustain life. It will appeal to students, planners, and policy makers working in environmental studies, environmental engineering, urban and regional planning, architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

Korkut Onaran is a founder principal of Pel-Ona Architects and Urbanists. He also teaches as adjunct, in the College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado at Denver. Urbanism, regulation cultures, and development codes have been a focus of his teaching and practice. His book Crafting form-based codes: Resilient design, policy, and regulation was published by Routledge in 2019.