"For architects-and the countless others who work together creating human habitation-twenty-first century imperatives demand a profound mode shift, from an expansion mindset to one of reintegration and healing. Especially in highly developed countries like the United States, our approach to using, caring for, and adapting the built environment is shortsighted and outrageously wasteful. Revitalizing communities by optimizing existing resources makes social, economic, and environmental sense and directs resources where they are most needed. There are so many lessons to learn from built heritage, particularly about the cultural and multi-generational value of building and cities. Climate change is a terrible outcome from a brief period in human history, the roughly two hundred years of industrial societies powered by fossil fuels. In the context of more than six thousand years of urban civilization, our modern way of life is an anomaly, a time of experimentation incited by rejection of tradition and facilitated by technological revolution. Further, nearly half of global population today does not much share in these contemporary circumstances, something our modern-era biases cause us to view in categorically negative terms. In this book, architect Carl Elefante address how buildings and cities can and must help resolve the looming climate emergency.

It is not just another book about an increasingly familiar subject. Instead, it offers a decidedly alternative viewpoint, one informed by his architecture career rescuing buildings from senseless demolition and learning from the practices and wisdom embedded in built heritage. The built environment empowers the greatest human assets: engagement and cooperation. Modern-era planning principles prioritized separation and exclusion and proposed ubiquitous transportation as connective tissue in place of urban fabric. The challenges of reintegrating and healing communities asks of those who shape the built environment to see beyond the modern world. This book is written to nudge architects and those we work with beyond the modern and toward an architecture for the climate, justice, and urban imperatives"-- Provided by publisher.