Today's most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change.
Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy.
Aimed especially at designers and architects, Motivating Change explores the diversity of current approaches to change, and the multiple ways in which behaviour can be understood as an enactment of values and beliefs, standards and habitual practices in daily life, and more broadly in the urban environment.
The editors and authors tackle a very tough and sticky task: how to promote sustainable cities, knowing that changing individual behaviour is at least as relevant as changing public policy. In today's age of crowdsourcing and social media, behaviour can change much more quickly via changing norms and offering examples of sustainable changes that benefit all. A realistic look at one of the key challenges of our times: positive change to preclude negative outcomes. - Jerry Yudelson, LEED Fellow, Yudelson Associates Architects, Arizona, USA
This book explores the intricacies, and challenges involved in the implementation of successfully changing the way society behaves through four distinct sections. In order to elucidate these challenges clearly the chapters are thematically organized, and comprise essays from internationally known scholars. This book provides valuable insight into the historical and material elements that have influenced and shaped the way we interact with the world. The need to learn from one another, the need to see our past, not as a failing but as an opportunity to improve ourselves, this book really has it all. It's food for the soul, and for the mind. It's inspiration, a chorus of voices leading the way to a better future. Professor Michael Braungart, Cradle-to-Cradle and CEO of EPEA, Hamburg, Germany
This book reminds us that people, institutions and a complex array of social forces are what drive changes in the designs of sustainable buildings and places. Social media and ever more sophisticated technological advances add new wrinkles to these relationships. Human behaviours and motivations have largely fuelled today's environmental predicaments and will be equally critical to reversing course. Learn more how this might be done by reading this book. Professor Robert Cervero, Professor of City & Regional Planning and Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies, University of California at Berkeley, USA
