Page 26 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Introduction Chapter j 1 3

Sustainia from Denmark at: www.sustainia.me. The most significant global
group leader is the United Nations, whose Paris Conference in December 2015
created the G20 nations including the United States, China, Russia. the UK,
Germany, Turkey, Brazil, and others. The B20 was created to support the G20
nations in issues ranging from finance to labor to infrastructures that in 2017
was sponsored by Germany and focused on Africa. See the Case on B20 for
2017 from Germany.
Meanwhile, unfortunately the federal US government currently in power
does not see the need to continuing these policies, plans, and financing. The
US federal government denies there is climate change and therefore is
reducing its climate preservation funding, science, and technological solutions
(https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/05/26/if-theyre-wrong-planet-
dies).
The result is that the state of California (and now other US states) has been
and will continue to be the leader in climate preservation. California has the
sixth largest GDP in the world and continues to take aggressive actions,
technologies, and financing for climate preservation.
This is what the rest of the United States and world need to do. Germany,
Japan, Korea and China have already been doing this for over 2 decades now
as some cases demonstrate in the book (http://www.eseoulpost.com/news/
articleView.html?idxno¼9432).
It will not be easy. Japan as Chapter 24 demonstrates has been a leader for
decades in part due to its reliance on energy from fossil fuels and even nuclear
power plants despite the atomic bombs that were dropped on the nation at the
end of World War II.
SCCDH (second edition) is a book long in the making and overdue.
Basically the book maps out what communities need to do when thinking
about how to protect their environment while repairing, building, or expanding
themselves. (At this point, there is no need to review all the chapters and cases
but only to refer to some.)
What the book does is basically outline the need for specific tools or
mechanisms that allow people and companies to create sustainable commu-
nities. The best way to tell the story about sustainable as green, smart, and
healthy development is by way of examples. Therefore, communities are
defined and illustrated by the cases since they are often self-contained com-
munities with all the attributes therein from residential to recreational areas
that include the use of basic infrastructures that need to be integrated ranging
from water and energy to transportation and telecommunication systems.
My 2014 book on the GIR is a concept that puts these issues into a broader
picture about society and its industrial growth. The GIR is an industrial rev-
olution that uses renewable energy power and fuel generation along with
storage and new technology devices including the interconnection of com-
munities into “smart grids.” As Chapter 2 on the GIR stated, the GIR is now in
the EU and Asia and has only recently come to the United States in the last few