Positive Development: From Vicious Circles to Virtuous Cycles Through Built Environment Design

Genuine sustainability will require more than “ecological restoration”. “Zero carbon” and “zero waste”, at best, leave things as they are – we need to go beyond zero to development that delivers positive impacts. Achieving truly massive positive gains calls for a new approach to the planning, design and management of our built environment.

Design and planning guru Janis Birkeland presents the innovative new paradigm of Positive Development in which the built environment provides greater life quality, health, amenity and safety for all without sacrificing resources or money. Birkeland makes the case that with a different form of design that focuses on what we can do to achieve positive outcomes, not on what we should not do; development itself can become a “sustainability solution”. The cornerstone of this new paradigm is nothing less than the eco-retrofitting of the vast urban fabric we already inhabit. The author presents a revolutionary new tool called SmartMode to achieve this end.

This challenging book issues a challenge to anyone working in or studying the areas of sustainable development, planning, architecture or the built environment to rethink their current ideas and practices.

Janis Birkeland worked consecutively as artist, advocacy planner, architect, urban designer, city planner and attorney in San Francisco before entering academia in Australia. She has authored about 100 publications on built environment and sustainability and wrote the highly successful and widely adopted Design for Sustainability (Earthscan, 2002). She is now Professor of Architecture at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.