Alternative Routes to the Sustainable City: Austin, Curitiba, and Frankfurt

Alternative Routes to the Sustainable City offers a unique and thorough analysis of three major cities and their individual paths toward sustainable development. Dr. Steven A. Moore investigates the exemplary cities of Austin, Texas, Curitiba, Brazil, and Frankfurt, Germany to examine how each city has approached and maintained sustainability, and thus stimulated economic growth, preserved threatened ecosystems, and improved social equity. These three cities have successfully developed different dispositions toward politics, nature, and technology, proving that there is no single abstract model or universal checklist but different approaches for different people. Incorporating interviews with the citizens themselves with current topographical research, Moore critically questions the relationship between sustainability and democracy. Alternative Routes to the Sustainable City is a necessary and pivotal read that will appeal to scholars of environmental studies and those interested in city development.

Steven A. Moore is the Bartlett Cocke Professor of Architecture and Planning at the University of Texas at Austin.