Sustaining a City's Culture and Character

Charles Wolfe and Tigran Haas are passionate about the culture and character of cities, and their book Sustaining a City's Culture and Character is a relevant contribution to the knowledge how to maintain the identity of our urban places. The principles of public space identified in the book are free of nostalgia and go beyond mere concepts of heritage conservation. The book gives guidance how to avoid the trap of urban renewal that is out-of-scale, context, and character the kind of development that has destroyed so much of the distinctive place attributes and ignored or diminished the differences of our urban places--Steffen Lehmann, Professor of Architecture, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (USA) and University of Portsmouth (UK), Author of The Principles of Green Urbanism. Transforming the City for Sustainability Nothing is more important in planning and urban design than understanding what makes successful places work. Charles R Wolfe is a master of the art of observation and interpretation, and his new book generously shares his insights.--Rob Cowan, author of The Dictionary of Urbanism

Charles R. Wolfe is a London-based, multinational urbanism consultant, author, visiting scholar in Sweden, recent Fulbright specialist in Australia for an award-winning project, and long-time American environmental/land use lawyer. He holds a graduate degree in regional planning and has 34 years of experience in environmental, land use, and real estate law. He has held leadership positions in both the legal and planning professions. He has represented public and private clients in property redevelopment, regulatory entitlements, drafting and brownfield remediation issues in Washington State and other venues. He is founder and principal advisor of Seeing Better Cities Group, has practiced at several law firms, and has served as a long-time affiliate associate professor in the College of the Built Environments at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he has taught land use law and contributed to major research efforts addressing urban center and brownfield redevelopment. He has written regularly for many publications, including The Atlantic, The Atlantic Cities/CityLab, Governing, CityMetric, Planetizen, The Huffington Post, Grist, and Crosscut. He blogs at myurbanist.com. He is the author of Seeing the Better City and Urbanism Without Effort . Tigran Haas is associate professor of urban planning and urban design, former director of Civitas Athenaeum Laboratory (CAL), current director of the Centre for the Future of Places (CFP), and the director of the Graduate Program in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He has studied in the United States, former Yugoslavia (BiH and Croatia), and Sweden and has also completed postdoctoral fellowships at MIT, Boston, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Haas holds advanced degrees in architecture, urban planning and design, environmental science and regional planning. He has written more than fifty scholarly articles, thirty-five conference papers, five books, four research anthologies, and has been involved in teaching in international educational programs.