Patrick M. Condon

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn't have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing costs ensued. In just one city, Vancouver, land prices increased by 600 percent between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In this engaging, readable, and clearly reasoned treatise, Patrick Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good – and proposes bold strategies that cities in North America could use to shift it back.

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world. As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change, they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities, planning and design expert Patrick Condon explains how urban designers can assimilate these interconnected changes into their work. Condon shows how the very things that constrain cities, climate change, migration, financial stress, population change, could actually enable the emergence of a more equitable and resource-efficient city. He provides five rules for urban designers: (1) See the City as a System; (2) Recognise Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages. In Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities, Condon provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow's sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them.

Questions of how to green the North American economy, create a green energy and transportation infrastructure, and halt the deadly increase in greenhouse gas buildup dominate our daily news. Related questions of how the design of cities can impact these challenges dominate the thoughts of urban planners and designers across the U.S. and Canada. With admirable clarity, Patrick Condon discusses transportation, housing equity, job distribution, economic development, and ecological systems issues and synthesizes his knowledge and research into a simple-to-understand set of urban design rules that can, if followed, help save the planet.

A step-by-step guide to more synthetic, holistic, and integrated urban design strategies, "Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities" is a practical manual to accomplish complex community design decisions and create more green, clean, and equitable communities.The design charrette has become an increasingly popular way to engage the public and stakeholders in public planning, and "Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities" shows how citizens and officials can use this tool to change the way they make decisions, especially when addressing issues of the sustainable community.Designed to build consensus and cooperation, a successful charrette produces a design that expresses the values and vision of the community. Patrick Condon outlines the key features of the charrette, an inclusive decision-making process that brings together citizens, designers, public officials, and developers in several days of collaborative workshops.Drawing on years of experience designing sustainable urban environments and bringing together communities for charrettes, Condon's manual provides step-by-step instructions for making this process work to everyone's benefit. He translates emerging sustainable development concepts and problem-solving theory into concrete principles in order to explain what a charrette is, how to organize one, and how to make it work to produce sustainable urban design results.