Transportation For America » Peter Newman “Resilient Cities” Book Launch

Peter Newman “Resilient Cities” Book Launch

January 26, 2009
By Stephen Lee Davis

Transportation For America, Smart Growth America and Island Press invite you to attend the launch of a new book by Australian urban planning expert Peter Newman. “Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change” is the newest book by Newman, the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Australia, and one of the most ground-breaking researchers and thought leaders on transportation and smart growth around today.

Prof. Newman is now working closely with the Australian government on environmental planning, helping the government to examine the future of their country in light of high energy prices and the impacts of climate change.

Resilient Cities discusses how cities can be made to be more independent and resilient by offering increased access to local food sources and alternative energy, creating stronger community ties and closer links with nature.

Transportation For America communications director David Goldberg cited some of Peter Newman’s latest research recently in a post on Worldchanging entitled “Is the Old Economy of Car Dependence Over?”

When the financial meltdown has cooled, lenders regain their intestinal fortitude and home-building fires up again, will most of the new housing follow the late 20th century pattern and pop up in car-dependent exurbs? Or will cities and their suburbs start filling in around newly-built public transit systems and take the form of walkable, less car-dependent neighborhoods?

The Australian government, apparently, is betting on the former, but new research from one of that country’s leading institutions pegs it as a losing proposition.

Car-dependent development on the urban fringe requires taxpayers to spend astronomical sums on spread-out infrastructure, even as it exacts a toll on the air, land and planetary climate. All in all, the costs are double those of more walkable neighborhoods closer to jobs and services, according to Curtin University’s Professor Peter Newman.

For those of you in DC, join us Tuesday night at the German Marshall Fund near Dupont Circle to meet the author and hear a little more about his work

RSVP’s are requested with the info above.