McDonald replaces the old view of conservation that emphasizes 'how to protect nature from cities' with a new view of 'how to protect nature for cities.' The book demonstrates how recent developments in green infrastructure creation, ecosystem service valuation, and environmental modeling can be incorporated into environmental planning efforts. Practitioners and students of environmental planning will want to keep this clear and insightful volume close at hand.
Philip R. Berke Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University Thorough, logical, and conversational book for those seeking to make fast-growing cities work for nature, and vice versa.
Planning A thorough, well-researched, and important compilation of relevant topics and case studies that delivers a valuable contribution for building an understanding about ecosystem services and natural infrastructure management into urban design and planning...[McDonald] has provided a resource and building block for all those interested and engaged in urban ecosystem services research.
Landscape Ecology In this modest and succinct primer, he explains with an engaging informality ways to deal with many of the standard environmental shortcomings affecting U.S. cities, whether caused by the forces of nature or by human misuse. He also inserts anecdotes from his personal experience, but mostly this book describes a rational and realistic planning, problem-solving, inventory, implementation, and monitoring process that could apply to a range of interventions from modest to bold.
Urban Land Plainspoken, relentlessly practical, and appearing at a time when interest in the notion of urban livability is cresting, Conservation for Cities is a welcome new resource.
Civil Engineering [Conservation for Cities] provides exponentially more value [for] anyone interested in the benefits of integrating natural infrastructure into our cities...offers a compelling trail head to these [nature's] pathways of the future.
ASLA's The Dirt Cities are the future of mankind, and Conservation in Cities is the ideal guide to making them work.
David Owen author of Green Metropolis Conservation for Cities is an excellent primer on both large scale and site scale green infrastructure. This truly enjoyable and well-paced survey spans from broad planning approaches to descriptions of specific ecosystem services. A focus on technical details, rather than specific regulatory, political, or environmental conditions, makes the book a universally relevant resource, and a good complement to more place-specific analyses.
Mami Hara Deputy Commissioner and Chief of Staff, Philadelphia Water