Search results for ""Author Harrison Fraker""

How do you achieve effective low-carbon design beyond the building level? How do you create a community that is both liveable and sustainable? More importantly, how do you know if you succeeded? Harrison Fraker goes beyond abstract principles to provide a clear, in-depth evaluation of four first generation low-carbon neighbourhoods in Europe, and shows how those lessons can be applied. Using concrete performance data to gauge successes and failures, he presents a holistic model based on best practices. The four case studies are: Bo01 in Malmo and Hammarby in Stockholm, Sweden and Kronsberg in Hannover and Vauban in Freiberg, Germany. Each was built deliberately to conserve resources: all are mixed-used, contain at least 1,000 units, and employ aggressive strategies for energy and water efficiency, recycling, and waste treatment. For each case study, Fraker explores the community's development process and principles, goals and objectives as they relate to urban form, transportation, green space, energy, water, and waste systems, social agenda, overall performance, and lessons learned. Later chapters compare the different strategies employed by the case-study communities and develop a comprehensive model of sustainability, looking specifically at how these lessons can be employed. Fraker also shows that sustainability isn't limited to newly built neighbourhoods - retrofits can benefit even our most established communities. This whole-systems approach promises not only a smaller carbon footprint, but an enriched form of urban living.

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This book calls attention to the public space of cities. It proposes that the environmental performance of public space is underdeveloped and is primed to play a more integrated role in combatting the urgency of climate change, while also creating a more meaningful experience of the city. The approach is influenced by recent insights from neuroscience that are generating a growing body of evidence for the underlying bodily basis of mind and meaning imply a reformulation of urban design theory. Minding the City is an effort to refocus the subject of urban design on the tangible and visceral experience of public space, to remind urban designers that our concept of the city is grounded in bodily experience. It discusses emerging insights from neuroscience and their potential impact on urban design in detail, not as a formula for design, but to bring awareness, a new sensibility to the design process. It uses a set of case studies to illustrate how the insights from neuroscience are operative in how we experience and value the built environment. It finishes with an exploration of the sensory and aesthetic potential of sustainable systems and then illustrates, through a series of urban design studies, how they might be used to create better environmental performance while creating more meaningful, even poetic urban spaces.

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