Publications

This book responds to the crises of sustainability in the world today by going back to basics. It provides a means of reflexivity learning about urban sustainability, while working practically for positive social change. It challenges the usually taken-for-granted nature of sustainability practices, while providing tools for modifying those practices. It emphasizes the necessity of a holistic and integrated understanding of urban life. Finally it rewrites existing dominant understandings of the social whole.

Proposing a renovation of the metaphor of the urban fabric, Interwoven Cities develops an analysis of how cities might be woven into alternative patterns, to better sustain social and ecological life. It intersects with and builds upon the key arguments of Circles of Sustainability. It considers in further detail the technical and aesthetic dimensions critical to sustaining urban life.

This essay examines the ontological layers of the human communities who inhabit three illustrative Global South cities, and argues for a reconfiguration of urban form that reinvigorates the ways of life that tend to be marginalized or submerged. This re-imagining involves not a dismissal of modern ontologies per se, but rather a critique of the dominance of the modern.

Approaches to sustainability are typically characterized as being either ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’, global or local. While top-down approaches are commonly adopted by governments and international organizations, bottom-up and local approaches tend to be adopted by civil society organizations and communities. We outline a way of bridging these two approaches.

There are currently no developed guidelines for assessing the cultural impact, sustainability or vibrancy of cultural development. The overall goal of this Report is to develop the principles, protocols, indicators and tools for a cultural impact assessment process. The Report was commissioned in the framework of the revision of Agenda 21 for culture (2013-2015) and it also contributes to the activities of the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments for Post-2015 Development Agenda towards Habitat III (2016).