Sober cities. New models of resource management.

Sustainable, frugal, sober, resilient, smart cities… Faced with the environmental emergency, innovative urban projects to reduce pollution and waste are multiplying all over the world.

But what are these experiments worth on a global scale?

What are their limitations? Is it possible to make a city sustainable without harming its neighbors? How can we detect false good ideas?

This is what this book sets out to do. It does not merely provide an overview of pioneering experiments carried out in nine cities in industrialized and emerging countries, in both the North and the South, but also looks at processes of very different scales and types—from a single urban object to an entire city—in an attempt to assess their impact and identify ways in which they can be generalized.