This book provides a balanced international overview of the way forward, showing how choice of materials and construction processes, response to landscape and climate, and - not to be forgotten - the involvement of users, can together solve environmental problems and produce a diverse architecture to suit human and regional needs.

This publication focusses on the Aral Sea crisis - the result of economic processes set in motion by the planners of the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1950s. It is one of the biggest ecological disasters, second only to Chernobyl, leading to a total collapse of the socio-economic life of the people.