Book launch: Unlocking Sustainable Cities
A toolkit for realising a more sustainable and co-operative urban future has been created with the publication of a new book.
Unlocking Sustainable Cities, written by Professor Paul Chatterton
Today, urban areas are held back by corporate greed, loss of public space and rising inequality. In his book, Paul Chatterton, Professor of Urban Futures in the School of Geography, highlights how cities are locked into unsustainable and damaging practices, and how exciting new routes can be unlocked for real change.
Across the world, city innovators are putting real sustainability into practice – from transforming abandoned public spaces and setting up community co-operatives, to rewilding urban nature and powering up civic energy.
Paul explores the power of these city experiments that harness the creative power of the collective, focusing on five themes – compassion, imagination, experimentation, co-production and transformation – as well as four city systems: mobility, energy, community and nature. Imagining radical alternatives, such as car-free, post-carbon, common and 'bio-cities', this is a toolkit for generating real urban change.
Paul said: “I wrote this book for a simple reason. We don’t know what a city future needs to be if we are to make a rapid transition to meeting the UN Paris Agreement target of holding rises in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees. This book shows what needs to be done.”
Paul is a writer, researcher and campaigner. He is currently Director of the University's Sustainable Cities Group, which has launched the ground-breaking MSc Sustainable Cities course. Paul is also co-founder and resident of the award-winning low-impact housing co-operative, Lilac. And he has helped set up Leeds Community Homes to promote community-led housing.
Unlocking Sustainable Cities is published by Pluto Press, priced £16.99.
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