Sustainable Urban Forms Planning and Design Strategies: the Compact City, Urban Sprawl, and Mixed Use Development in Theory and Practice

Majority of the cities across the world are facing over population, environmental degradation and other planning challenges that make their situation unsustainable. This book discusses the relationship between urban form and sustainable development, energy consumption for transportation, environmental and social sustainability and also the quality of life in the city. To identify the strategies for design and planning sustainable city form, this volume puts the two contradictory yet predominant theories in practice: ?the Compact city? Idea from the European context, and ?Urban Sprawl? theory from Australia and North America. Four types of urban forms are selected as case studies and are measured in detail, in terms of their density and land use pattern. This volume proposes the applicable strategies for achieving a greater urban sustainability based on the empirical evidences from the west of Scotland-UK. It argues the necessity of ?Mixed use? function which should be combined with "Density" measures simultaneously to create a new balanced model which can be termed ?Compact- mixed use city form? as the alternative for achieving urban sustainability.