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Zofnass Program and “Planning Sustainable Cities” guidebook featured in Engineering News-Record

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure recently released the guidebook Planning Sustainable Cities: An Infrastructure Based Approach (Routledge, 2016), intended to foster an integrated approach to designing and building sustainable infrastructure in parallel with urban-planning considerations. Planning Sustainable Cities was directed and edited by the GSD’s Spiro N. Pollalis, who has directed the Zofnass Program since 2008.

The guidebook was featured this month by Engineering News-Record, on the heels of the Zofnass Program’s conference on the topic.

Guidebook "Planning Sustainable Cities," directed and edited by Spiro N. Pollalis
Guidebook “Planning Sustainable Cities,” directed and edited by Spiro N. Pollalis

“A sustainable city should have a sustainable infrastructure,” Pollalis says, “and sustainable infrastructure should go hand-in-hand with the planning of the city.”

Offering an analytical framework for urban sustainability, Planning Sustainable Cities approaches infrastructure as a series of systems that function in synergy and are directly linked with urban planning. This method streamlines and guides the planning process, while still highlighting detail, each infrastructure system is decoded in four “system levels.”

These objectives correspond to the five focus areas of the Zofnass Program: quality of life, the natural world, climate and risk, resource allocation, and leadership.

Held on November 3 and 4, the Zofnass Program’s “Planning Sustainable Cities Conference” was thematically organized according to the key infrastructure systems delineated in the guidebook. The conference convened city planners, leaders in infrastructure development, designers, engineers, academics, and public officials to share perspectives on sustainable city planning as well as to discuss the proposed infrastructure-based planning approach for sustainable cities.

Learn more about the Planning Sustainable Cities guidebook at Engineering News-Record.