OUR CITIES DEPEND ON US

With rare verve, a trained architect surveys some of the innovative and ingenious ways that 13 cities worldwide are making themselves greener and coping with changing climate conditions.

As noteworthy for the lush, lively illustrations as for the initiatives and projects that they depict, this overview offers a range of successes both large and small that are bound to get would-be urban designers’ creative juices flowing. The book opens with views of gardens planted on the tops of buses and bus stops and on tall buildings in Singapore and closes with a look at skyscrapers made of laminated timber going up in Vancouver. In between, Tentler-Krylov highlights a floating park made from recycled litter in Rotterdam, huge gates that rise up in the lagoon of Venice to minimize storm flooding, and a park landscaped to divert floodwaters in Bangkok away from streets and into a retention pond to draw on in the dry season. Curious readers will appreciate the frequent smaller inset pictures, which supplement the lucid verbal descriptions with diagrams of internal mechanisms or other hidden details. Nor does Tentler-Krylov neglect the human element, adding to nearly every scene colorfully dressed, multiracial crowds of pedestrians or crews of busy workers.

Stimulating glimpses of local solutions to widespread and increasingly pressing environmental issues.