BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY HOME: the sustainable urban neighbourhood.

David Rudlin and Nicholas Falk (URBED, The Urban & Economic Development Group). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 1999. [pounds]19.99

The argument of this book is that the sustainable urban neighbourhood is our new millennium's answer to the nineteenth-century terrace street and the twentieth-century semi-D suburb. Such neighbourhoods enjoy a central location within existing cities, with life throbbing in their dense exciting vandal-free streets. Work mixes with habitat; pedestrians and cyclists predominate over cars; the bus service is good; there's the odd corner shop like in the old days. The buildings form proper streets, well proportioned and handsome, sometimes with trees down them. And inside the blocks so formed, wholesome organic vegetables grow, rainwater is collected for re-use, solar panels bask in the sun and children play happily. It sounds pretty good -- and it's sustainable: socially, economically and environmentally.

There is a growing abundance of books about environmental/ecological sustainability. This is one such, and it draws on the authors' experience at URBED and the model project carried out in the Hulme area of Manchester. Many of the ideas are not new, as the authors readily acknowledge -- Jane Jacobs was talking about social and economic sustainability some 40 years ago, though with different words. If her message has still not hit home, any new attempt is to be welcomed. But I have two regrets about this book. It touches too much on the issues Jacobs dealt with, and not enough on the environmental/energy problems she didn't. And I miss her energetic prose.