Unravelling Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment: Book Review

Below is a short extract of the Unravelling Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment book review published in the Landscape Review Journal.

Sustainability and resilience are often used interchangeably in discourses about the built environment, but, in fact, they mean very different things. This is what Emilio Jose Garcia and Brenda Vale have endeavoured to clarify in their book Unravelling Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment. They set out to investigate if sustainability and resilience are compatible, and if theories of resilience – particularly ecological resilience – can be applied to the built environment. The authors note that urban designers and architects rarely participate in institutions concerned with resilience, and they question the reasons for this mismatch while aiming to be ‘the first architectural toe dipped into the cold water of resilience’ (p 12).

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This book is an important step in clarifying the meaning of sustainability and understanding the meaning of resilience,
especially when applying theories of ecological resilience to the built environment. (…) The ideas discussed in this book are timely and important, and any professional concerned with the built environment should become familiar with this publication.

Unravelling Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment, Emilio Jose Garcia and Brenda Vale, New York, NY, USA: Routledge, 2017,

The full book review has been published in the Landscape Review Journal and can be downloaded here.