Garden City Mega City: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming

Garden City Mega City is a timely and challenging book for anyone concerned by the global consequences of the unsustainable growth of those cities. City planning and architecture are no longer the preserve of specialists, as the biggest decisions must be made by the community at large. Only two percent of the planet's land area is urbanised, but that two percent consumes eighty percent of our energy. The fossil fuelled energy consumption of our cities is destroying the planet. Garden City Mega City illustrates the depressing realities of life in the mega cities, and documents the ill advised planning decisions that created such blighted environments. But Garden City Mega City also proposes a way to escape what now appears to be an inevitable fate, one of terminal dysfunction. The mega cities have been re imagined as 21st century garden cities ... dense and vertical, yet sociable and sustainable. The fundamental strategies and principles of these new garden cities are explained and illustrated, as are WOHA's large scale prototypes, many of which have already been built. The Self Sufficient City, the ultimate 21st century city, is presented in detail. Garden City Mega City includes a Rating Cities set of measurements, which can be used to assess the social and ecological value of urban developments.