How to Save the City
A guide for emergency action
How to Save the City is a guide for action on the converging and accelerating emergencies of our age. While the climate emergency is the most urgent, we also face deep and long standing social inequalities in health, housing, work, gender and race, the breakdown of our natural world, and the deep ripples resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Our emergency action needs to be urgent and decisive yet also empowering and inclusive.
These emergencies are playing out in dramatic ways in urban areas. Locked in to high-energy, high-resource use, cities are responsible for about three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, have ecological and carbon footprints far bigger than their city limits, and are the beating heart of our pro-growth, unequal, consumer-saturated way of life.
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Without decisive action, we are facing the possibility of an Earth that is uninhabitable for humans. This book is a guide for what we can all do to mount emergency responses, in order to, literally, save the city.
How to Save the City is a wake-up call and action plan; provocative and disruptive, yet playful and game-inspired. The book begins by looking at the challenge ahead in our decade of transformation. It then engages, inspires and empowers all those engaged in city life to get into emergency mode - offering a strategic plan, guidance and practical tactics to save their city. The book outlines a number of players who can use this strategic approach to make big moves.