Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development (Social Environmental Sustainability)

Is the doomsday scenario inevitable? With our increasingly diminishing natural habitat and other natural resources, it seems that we are headed in that direction. After centuries of patchwork land planning, out-of-scale development and cookbook methods, it is clear that we need a better way. Authors Silberstein and Maser explore a different scenario in Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development.
The authors review the foundations of current land use practices from historical, constitutional, economic, ecological, and societal perspectives. They analyze the results of these practices and suggest alternative methods for guiding, directing, and controlling the ways in which we modify the landscape. They make the case that we-as humans-have the capacity for community with all life and can ultimately embrace the notion that individual well-being is wrapped up in the well-being of the whole, and that social change can occur before major disasters require it.
This is the first book to incorporate land-use planning with sustainability. The authors offer a perspective that opens a range of possibilities for changing current methods. They tackle the difficult dilemma of creating consensus among people-tapping the powers of mind, intuition, and experience in developing a sustainable community. Using sustainability as a framework, Silberstein and Maser present the underlying concepts of sustainable land-use planning. With Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development, you will discover an array of ideas for modifying conventional planning for and regulation of the development of land.

This book should be read, studied, and then used by all local planners and planning boards. Clearly and interestingly written, it belongs not only in academic libraries but, more importantly, in all public libraries, where it will be accessible to interested citizens.
--R. L. Smith, in CHOICE, March 2001, Vol. 38, No. 7