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Sustainable Urban Environments pp 263–284Cite as

Sustainable Urban Form

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Abstract

With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas and climate change, one of the biggest challenges of our times, it is time to turn our attention to cities in order to tackle this challenge. The layout or urban form of a city can influence the environmental impact of the urban settlement to a considerable extent. There are great differences between cities in terms of their urban form and their environmental footprints. Five key elements of urban form can be distinguished: density, surface, land use, road/public transport infrastructure and the economic relationship with the surrounding environment. The compact city is often advocated as a more sustainable urban form but this is not undisputed. Urban form can influence the environmental impact, but it can only facilitate; it is people and their behaviour that ultimately determine the negative or positive environmental impact of urban areas.

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Acknowledgments

This chapter has been prepared in parallel with a European Commission funded research project on urban metabolism – Sustainable Metabolism in Europe (SUME; EU project number 212034). The author is grateful to the members of the SUME consortium for their contributions to the project to the content of this chapter. In particular, Dominic Stead, from Delft University of Technology, has provided various comments and inputs to this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Jody Milder

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  1. Jody Milder
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Correspondence to Jody Milder .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technology, Policy and Manage, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Ellen van Bueren

  2. Schipluiden, Netherlands

    Hein van Bohemen

  3. OTB Research Institute for the Built Env, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Laure Itard

  4. OTB Research Institute for the Built Env, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Henk Visscher

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Milder, J. (2012). Sustainable Urban Form. In: van Bueren, E., van Bohemen, H., Itard, L., Visscher, H. (eds) Sustainable Urban Environments. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1294-2_10

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