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Book Review: Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities

This book review summarizes Dennis Rodwell's book "Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities". The book discusses how urban conservation and sustainability are closely related, using examples from Europe. It describes how conservation evolved from an elitist interest to a scientific approach and important factor in planning. The book then discusses theories from influential thinkers and moves to linking sustainability concepts to historic cities. It emphasizes balancing socioeconomic and environmental organizations in historic cities through diversity and minimum intervention development. Examples like Sibiu, Asmara, urban villages and garden cities achieve sustainable development goals. The conclusion discusses how conservation and sustainability principles should be considered in planning systems.

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Kanchi Choudhary
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73 views1 page

Book Review: Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities

This book review summarizes Dennis Rodwell's book "Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities". The book discusses how urban conservation and sustainability are closely related, using examples from Europe. It describes how conservation evolved from an elitist interest to a scientific approach and important factor in planning. The book then discusses theories from influential thinkers and moves to linking sustainability concepts to historic cities. It emphasizes balancing socioeconomic and environmental organizations in historic cities through diversity and minimum intervention development. Examples like Sibiu, Asmara, urban villages and garden cities achieve sustainable development goals. The conclusion discusses how conservation and sustainability principles should be considered in planning systems.

Uploaded by

Kanchi Choudhary
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Book Review: Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities.

Dennis Rodwell (2007) Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities, Blackwell Publication.

Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities written by Dennis Rodwell; architect/planner publishes
widely on the theme of Conservation and Sustainability. The book here talks about how Urban Conservation
and Sustainability are closely related to each other in context with the historic cities, supported by many
examples from and across Europe.
The book starts with the background of Architectural Conservation, where it describes how from being an
elitist interest it became a scientific approach and further an important factor in city development planning.
This makes it one of the best book to understand the basics of Conservation.
From architectural Conservation the author moves towards the Urban Planning aspect. This whole
progression is explained Firstly, with the help of European and Washington Charters, in addition to support
the subject it given us a chronological development of all Chartres and Secondly, with the theories proposed
by great architects and thinker like Sir Ebenezer Howard (England), Le Corbusier (France), Patrick Geddes
(Scotland) and Gustavo Giovannoni (Italy).
Continuing to the theory of Geddes about the balance between the nature and human, concept of
Sustainability is brought into picture. This concept is more elaborated through many conventions and
seminars that happened at the global level and finally how all this is linked to historic cities, along with the
role of International initiatives like UNESCO which defines the relation between place, people and integrity in
relation to historic cities. This part of the book explains that since 1970s Sustainability as a subjected was
discussed on global levels and initiatives were taken to promote it. The idea Urban Conservation was taken
ahead from this point using many examples out of which according to me Marais Quarter: a metropolitan
center in Paris aptly describes the concept.
The author mentions that the city is a dynamic and complex ecosystem whose core objective is to balance
and self-regulate the socio economic and environmental organizations based on functional, structural and
social diversity and hence emphasizes on to carry out development which gives rise to Sustainable Cities
with a management plan and policies for future development. For the same he has mentioned many
examples out of which Sibiu and Asmara are working with an evolutionary agenda which obeys the principles
of minimum intervention in all the three aspects : Socially, Economically and Environmentally. And also
concept like Urban Villages, Urban Renaissance and Garden Cities contributes in achieving such
development goals.
In conclusion, the author in the book is wholly trying to talk about links between Conservation and
Sustainability and how they work on same principles, which in my opinion is something that current planning
systems should mandatorily take into consideration. In order to justify the link I beileve he has tried
highlighting the potential areas of coincidences at all possible levels and further talks on how a proper
futuristic management plan can help building up a sustainable city. He takes example of Bath and Edinburgh,
where he very nicely tries to highlight how Bath has an excellent management plan but excludes the principles
of sustainability completely, whereas the Edinburgh plan appears to confront them.

Kanchi Choudhary | PG190436 | MCR - CR4600 – History, Theory and Legislation of Conservation.

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