Gary Grant 
Ecosystem Services Come To Town [EPUB ebook] 
Greening Cities by Working with Nature

The need to find new approaches to the development of cities is
becoming increasingly urgent in this age of continuing population
growth, demographic transition, climate change, fossil fuel peak
and biodiversity losses. Restoring ecosystem services and promoting
biodiversity is essential to sustainable development – even
in the built environment.

Ecosystem Services come to Town: greening cities by working
with nature demonstrates how to make urban environments
greener. It starts by explaining how, by mimicking nature and
deliberately creating habitats to provide ecosystem services,
cities can become more efficient and more pleasant to live
in. The history of cities and city planning is covered with
the impacts of industrial urban development described, as well as
the contemporary concerns of biodiversity loss, peak oil and
climate change.

The later sections offer solutions to the challenges of
sustainable urban development by describing and explaining a whole
range of approaches and interventions, beginning at the regional
scale with strategic green infrastructure, looking at districts and
precincts, with trees, parks and rain gardens and ending with
single buildings, including with green roofs and living walls.

Technical enough to be valuable to practitioners but still
readable and inspirational, this guide demonstrates to town
planners, urban designers, architects, engineers, landscape
architects how to make cities more liveable.

Sobre el autor

Gary Grant is a Chartered Environmentalist, Member of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, an Academician at the Academy of Urbanism, Member of the All Party Parliamentary Committee on Biodiversity, thesis supervisor at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London, Chair of the Judges of the Integrated Habitats Design Competition and Director of the Green Roof Consultancy Ltd. As director of EDAW and then AECOM Design + Planning and now independent, he has worked on large scale planning projects including the London 2012 Olympic Park, the Bedford Valley River Park, the Whitehill-Bordon Eco Town, Education City, Qatar and Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi.