Routledge Motivating Change: Sustainable Design and Behaviour in the Built Environment (Earthscan Series on Sustainable Design)

Today’s most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change. Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy. Aimed especially at designers and architects, Motivating Change explores the diversity of current approaches to change, and the multiple ways in which behaviour can be understood as an enactment of values and beliefs, standards and habitual practices in daily life, and more broadly in the urban environment. Review The editors and authors tackle a very tough and sticky task: how to promote sustainable cities, knowing that changing individual behaviour is at least as relevant as changing public policy. In today's age of crowdsourcing and social media, behaviour can change much more quickly via changing norms and offering examples of sustainable changes that benefit all. A realistic look at one of the key challenges of our times: positive change to preclude negative outcomes. – Jerry Yudelson, LEED Fellow, Yudelson Associates Architects, Arizona, USAThis book explores the intricacies, and challenges involved in the implementation of successfully changing the way society behaves through four distinct sections. In order to elucidate these challenges clearly the chapters are thematically organized, and comprise essays from internationally known scholars. This book provides valuable insight into the historical and material elements that have influenced and shaped the way we interact with the world. The need to learn from one another, the need to see our past, not as a failing but as an opportunity to improve ourselves, this book really has it all. It’s food for the soul, and for the mind. It’s inspiration, a chorus of voices leading the way to a better future. Professor Michael Braungart, Cradle-to-Cradle and CEO of EPEA, Hamburg, GermanyThis book reminds us that people, institutions and a complex array of social forces are what drive changes in the designs of sustainable buildings and places. Social media and ever more sophisticated technological advances add new wrinkles to these relationships. Human behaviours and motivations have largely fuelled today's environmental predicaments and will be equally critical to reversing course. Learn more how this might be done by reading this book.Professor Robert Cervero, Professor of City & Regional Planning and Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies, University of California at Berkeley, USA About the Author Robert Crocker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia and teaches in both the history and theory of design and in the School’s Master of Sustainable Design program. He is a member of the Zero Waste SA Research Centre for Sustainable Design and Behaviour. His most recent publication was Designing for Zero Waste (Routledge, Earthscan, 2012), a book he also co-edited with Steffen Lehmann.Steffen Lehmann is the Director of the Zero Waste SA Research Centre for Sustainable Design and Behaviour at the University of South Australia. Steffen is a widely published author and scholar and is Founding Director of the s_Lab Space Laboratory for Architectural Research and Design (Sydney-Berlin). A German-born architect and urban designer, he is editor of the US based Journal of Green Building and an advisor to Australian and German government, city councils and industry.