Sustainable Nation: A Selected Bibliography

From bestselling author Douglas Farr comes Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future. Sustainable Nation seeks to shift the sustainability conversation towards the issue of how to change faster than ever be­fore. The book posits that society can overcome our major challenges around decarbonization in four generations: the lifetime of a child born today.

It is an ideal guidebook for urban designers, planners, policymakers, architects, engaged stakeholders, and anyone who is eager to make a positive impact on our—and our descendants’—buildings, cities, and lives. Douglas Farr will discuss Sustainable Nation: Urban Patterns for the Future on May 30 at 6pm at the Co-op.

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature, by Douglas Farr - This was Doug's first book, the precursor to Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future.

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander - The replicable patterns from A Pattern Language served as an direct inspiration for Sustainable Nation.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs - A classic perspective of planning that focuses on community, social capital, and the neighborhood scale.

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville - A classic discussion of democracy in America.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman - How our brains evolved to process information and make decisions has endless implications for society, including how people think about and communicate choices within their communities (and even how to identify them in the first place).

Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein - Decision architecture, and the default settings that are often set in the design of choices, can have large impacts on behaviors as well as the types of communities we create and maintain.

About Douglas Farr: Douglas Farr (FAIA, LEED AP, CNU-A) is an architect, urbanist, author, and passionate advocate for sustainable design thinking. Doug heads Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm that plans and designs lovable, aspirational buildings and places. A native Detroiter, Doug Co-Chaired the development of LEED-ND and has served on the boards of urban sustainability organizations including the Congress for New Urbanism, Bioregional, EcoDistricts, and Elevate Energy. He is an architecture graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. In 2017, Planetizen readers named him one of “the 100 most influential urbanists of all time.”