Sustainable Urban Design

• Errol J Haarhoff. Professor of Architecture, Director: Urban Research Network, University of Auckland

The Sustainable Urban Design Working Group gathered experts from around the world to research and discuss sustainable urban design approaches in their regions. The goal of this group was to share knowledge so that we can better understand the particularities of context as well as help identify more general, universally applicable approaches and ways of thinking. The working group invited researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplines including urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, planning, ecology, and engineering, to name a few.

The focus of this group covered a variety of scales ranging from the region to the district and neighborhood, the street, and down to the parcel. While this range is admittedly broad, the focus of this working group was primarily to understand and identify the overlaps and connections between scales and goals. The complexity of this issue requires multidisciplinary approaches that can break down silos and help define the relationships between approaches and areas of expertise.