Carfree Citiesby J H Crawford
Vividly contrasts the liveability of car-free Venice with the awfulness of Los Angeles’ strip malls. But these are such unrepresentative extremes that the lessons for other places are limited, and the lovingly detailed prescription for how imaginary cities could be structured to need no car traffic is unrealistically tidy. |
Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability: The Prospects for Green Growth by Paul Ekins
A thorough, intellectually strenuous but admirably clear explanation of how the two can be reconciled in both theory and practice, but which frustratingly doesn’t follow through the implications of its own recognition that economic growth tells us little about wellbeing anyway. |
Paying for Progress: A New Politics of Tax for Public Spending by the Fabian Society’s Commission on Tax and Citizenship.
A vigorous and closely argued defence of tax and spend as the positive way government can make things better, with detailed recommendations for taxing better. |
Holistic Government by Perri 6
Perri, then head of research at Demos offers a provocative analysis of why government is too often reactive, and calls for proactive, preventive government. But his key prescription - for decentralised, area-based cross-disciplinary teams bidding competitively for a slice of central budgets to service local client groups - seems likely to entrench the problems of parochialism, reactiveness, fragmentation, uncoordination, short termism and symptom-fixation which the first half of the book so accurately diagnoses in current arrangements. I argue for more systemic solutions. |
The Enemies of Progress: the dangers of sustainabilityby Austin Williams
A nasty sneery attack on sustainability and its advocates which doesn’t even manage to be entertaining. |
Cycling and Society edited by Dave Horton, Paul Rosen and Peter Cox
Bikes have been status symbols, tools of social liberation for women and of economic opportunity for workers. Cycling paved the way for the car, both perceptually by starting the habit and expectation of autonomous personal mobility, and also literally by creating demand for better road surfaces. This fascinating collection draws on disiplines as varied as social, cultural and technological history, politics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, even ethnology, to illuminate cycling as a social phenomenon. |
How we can save the planet by Mayer Hillman
A stark prescription for what needs to be done about climate change (though it’s humankind’s future prospects that need saving rather than the planet.) But its uncompromising message needs more ingratiating mediation. |
Living Planet Report by WWF
Comparison of countries’ ecological footprints is revealing, but the admirably clear and simple presentation leaves some puzzles unanswered. |
The politics of the Real World, Michael Jacobs / Real World CoalitionOn the eve of the 1997 election, 33 environmental and development NGOs agreed (miraculously, and not without some fudging) a common front on how environmental social and human challenges should be tackled together. Michael Jacobs managed to condense the agreement into this limpid manifesto which remains a persuasive and inspiring account of how sustainable development could actually be done. Too bad it went nowhere. |
Tomorrow's Worldby Duncan McLaren, Simon Bullock and Nusrat Yousuf for Friends of Earth.
A magisterial and authoritative assessment of how far the UK is from environmental sustainability, and what systemic packages of measures could put us on track. |
The End of the Yellowbrick Road by Tim Beaumont
An impassioned, and splendidly intellectually fearless, plea for sustainable development and denunciation of market sterility. But an infuriating read because of the bombastic self-indulgent style, sloppy editing and reliance on assertion instead of argument. |
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