Christopher de Sousa – författare

Concerns over urban blight, environmental degradation, climate change, inner-city unemployment, and a host of other socio-economic and environmental problems have forced policy makers, planners, and others interested in the future of our planet to take a closer look at ways to foster more sustainable urban development. Drawing on the author's extensive research, this book examines the role that brownfields redevelopment is playing and can play in our quest for sustainability, focusing primarily on efforts in the US and Canada to build better places for urban dwellers to live, work, and play. It commences by reviewing the nature and scope of the brownfields problem and puts it into a sustainability context, both theoretically and in terms of real costs and benefits. The book then looks at how brownfields are being used as spaces for developing an array of residential, recreational, and employment-oriented projects that have breathed new life into the urban environment. For a more sustainable future, however, the author argues that more still needs to be done to connect sustainability objectives and processes to redevelopment efforts. This is a study of the nature of urban brownfields redevelopment in North America over the last two decades. It outlines the reasons behind the emerging success of recent brownfields redevelopment. It critically examines how affected stakeholders have overcome the numerous challenges facing brownfields redevelopment.

While industrial and chemical innovations have contributed extensively to human advancement, the darker part of their legacy has been the hundreds of thousands of polluted sites left behind. Governments at all levels have rallied to support the remediation and reuse of these land resources and put many of the nation’s brownfields back into productive use. This book presents two dozen brownfield projects in the United States that have incorporated sustainability, highlighting project features, best management practices, and lessons from the field regarding the underlying policies and practices that enabled these projects to be completed or, in some cases, stalled, altered or abandoned.The case studies represent an array of brownfield projects that aimed to go beyond conventional practice and include a range and variety of end uses (e.g., corner gas stations, industrial, office, residential, brightfields, green space, mixed-use, and transit-oriented developments). The cases investigate site histories, planning and development and examine sustainability characteristics to understand how projects overcame the barriers to brownfield reuse and the implementation of sustainability features and derive a series of lessons learned, including innovative policies, programs, and/or funding mechanisms that helped make these projects work.Sustainable Brownfield Development will be of interest to developers, planners, consultants and community representatives interested in environmental policy, urban planning, community development, ecological restoration, economic development, and parks planning by providing direction and inspiration for those eager to erase the blight of the past and build a more sustainable future.