Green Urbanism: Formulating a Series of Holistic Principles, by Steffen Lehmann, summarizes the key aspects of green urbanism as distinct from of new urbanism.
Green Urbanism is a conceptual model for zero-emission and zero-waste urban design, which arose in the 1990s, promoting compact energy-efficient urban development, seeking to transform and re-engineer existing city districts and regenerate the post-industrial city centre. It promotes the development of socially and environmentally sustainable city districts.
This paper will first look at the timeline of important publications that have been published on sustainable design and have emerged from different schools of thought, to exemplify how gradually the notion of Green Urbanism evolved. It then identifies the intertwined principles for achieving Green Urbanism.
The 15 Principles of Green Urbanism are practical and holistic, offering an integrated framework, encompassing all the key aspects needed to establish sustainable development and encouraging best practice models. The replicability of models is hereby very important. The principles form a sustainability matrix, which will empower the urban designer – to borrow Richard Buckminster Fuller’s words – to find ways of ‘doing more with less.’ (Buckminster Fuller, 1973)
The article is from S.A.P.I.EN.S, Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment & Society, 3.2 | 2010: VOL. 3 / N°2, Views. S.A.P.I.EN.S is a peer-reviewed, open access, multidisciplinary journal focused on integrating knowledge to foster advances in sustainability research.