Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character: Principles and Best Practices

Somewhere, between character and caricature, there exists an authentic-a truly unique-urban place, that blends global and local, old and new. Yet, in a dramatically changing world dominated by crises of climate change, maintaining public health, and social justice, finding such places-and explaining their relevance-may be easier said than done.

Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character accepts that challenge, and provides a comprehensive method for assessing how and why successful places come to be, with an explicit emphasis on context: Authenticity, culture, character, and uniqueness are words with meanings that depend on who is using them and in what contexts.

Through text interwoven with 160 full-colour photographs by the author, and select illustrations by others, this book addresses how to enact blended and contextualised urban change, using the past and the status quo as catalysts rather than castaways. It provides resources and examples for the context-vetting process and for understanding how one era, object, or generation informs the next.