Urban Futures

Urban Futures PDF

Author: Timothy J. Dixon

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2021-05-19

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1447330935

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Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

Co-creating Sustainable Urban Futures

Co-creating Sustainable Urban Futures PDF

Author: Niki Frantzeskaki

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 3319692739

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This is a unique book that provides rich knowledge on how to understand and actively contribute to urban sustainability transitions. The book combines theoretical frameworks and tools with practical experiences on transition management as a framework that supports urban planning and governance towards sustainability. The book offers the opportunity to become actively engaged in working towards sustainable futures of cities. Readers of this book will be equipped to understand the complexity of urban sustainability transitions and diagnose persistent unsustainability problems in cities. Urban planners and professionals will build competences for designing transition management processes in cities and engaging with multidisciplinary knowledge in solution-seeking processes. The heart of the book marks the variety of very different local case studies across the world – including, amongst others, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, La Botija in Honduras, Sydney in Australia and Cleveland in the US. These rich studies give inspiration and practical insights to young planners on how to create sustainable urban futures in collaboration with other stakeholders. The case studies and critical reflections on applications of transition management in cities offer food for thought and welcome criticism. They also introduce new lenses to understand the bigger picture that co-creation dynamics play in terms of power, (dis-)empowerment, legitimacy and changing actor roles. This will equip the readers with a deep understanding of the dynamics, opportunities and challenges present in urban contexts and urban sustainability transitions.

Resilient Urban Futures

Resilient Urban Futures PDF

Author: Zoé A. Hamstead

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 3030631311

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This open access book addresses the way in which urban and urbanizing regions profoundly impact and are impacted by climate change. The editors and authors show why cities must wage simultaneous battles to curb global climate change trends while adapting and transforming to address local climate impacts. This book addresses how cities develop anticipatory and long-range planning capacities for more resilient futures, earnest collaboration across disciplines, and radical reconfigurations of the power regimes that have institutionalized the disenfranchisement of minority groups. Although planning processes consider visions for the future, the editors highlight a more ambitious long-term positive visioning approach that accounts for unpredictability, system dynamics and equity in decision-making. This volume brings the science of urban transformation together with practices of professionals who govern and manage our social, ecological and technological systems to design processes by which cities may achieve resilient urban futures in the face of climate change.

Intellectual, Scientific, and Educational Influences on Sustainability Research

Intellectual, Scientific, and Educational Influences on Sustainability Research PDF

Author: Turvey, Rosario Adapon

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1522573038

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Over the last few decades, the new discipline of sustainability science (SS) has evolved with a phenomenal rise in knowledge production, research, and publications, as well as the development of new academic programs and creation of centers and scientific communities, networks, and organizations. With pressing global environmental issues in the 21st century, SS has become an influential discipline and important subject of intellectual inquiry that deserves support from the academy and scientific communities worldwide to find solutions to global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss. Intellectual, Scientific, and Educational Influences on Sustainability Research is a concise and authoritative book that fills the crucial and unmet need for educational materials that integrates theoretical foundations, methodological basis, and practice in the science of sustainability. The goal of the book is to increase accessibility and use of educational and scientific knowledge among academic and non-academic audiences as it assembles the wisdom and insights from up-to-date scholarship and advances in this new discipline. Highlighting various topics such as biodiversity, public transportation, and human development, it is ideal for environmentalists, ecologists, technology developers, policymakers, academicians, researchers, and students.

Comparative Urban Research From Theory To Practice

Comparative Urban Research From Theory To Practice PDF

Author: Simon, David

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2020-03-25

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1447354095

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Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Reporting on the innovative, transdisciplinary research on sustainable urbanisation being undertaken by Mistra Urban Futures, a highly influential research centre based in Sweden, this book builds on the Policy Press title Rethinking Sustainable Cities to make a significant contribution to evolving theory about comparative urban research. Highlighting important methodological experiences from across a variety of diverse contexts in Africa and Europe, this book surveys key experiences and summarises lessons learned from the MUF’s global research platforms. It demonstrates best practice for developing and deploying different forms of transdisciplinary co-production, covering topics including neighbourhood transformation and housing justice, sustainable urban and transport development, urban food security and cultural heritage.

Pathways to Urban Sustainability

Pathways to Urban Sustainability PDF

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 030944456X

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Cities have experienced an unprecedented rate of growth in the last decade. More than half the world's population lives in urban areas, with the U.S. percentage at 80 percent. Cities have captured more than 80 percent of the globe's economic activity and offered social mobility and economic prosperity to millions by clustering creative, innovative, and educated individuals and organizations. Clustering populations, however, can compound both positive and negative conditions, with many modern urban areas experiencing growing inequality, debility, and environmental degradation. The spread and continued growth of urban areas presents a number of concerns for a sustainable future, particularly if cities cannot adequately address the rise of poverty, hunger, resource consumption, and biodiversity loss in their borders. Intended as a comparative illustration of the types of urban sustainability pathways and subsequent lessons learned existing in urban areas, this study examines specific examples that cut across geographies and scales and that feature a range of urban sustainability challenges and opportunities for collaborative learning across metropolitan regions. It focuses on nine cities across the United States and Canada (Los Angeles, CA, New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, Grand Rapids, MI, Flint, MI, Cedar Rapids, IA, Chattanooga, TN, and Vancouver, Canada), chosen to represent a variety of metropolitan regions, with consideration given to city size, proximity to coastal and other waterways, susceptibility to hazards, primary industry, and several other factors.

Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa

Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa PDF

Author: Michael Addaney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-31

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1000468143

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Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa provides a variety of conventional and emerging theoretical frameworks to inform understandings and responses to critical urban development issues such as urbanisation, climate change, housing/slum, informality, urban sprawl, urban ecosystem services and urban poverty, among others, within the context of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Africa. This book addresses topics including challenges to spatial urban development, how spatial planning is delivered, how different urbanisation variables influence the development of different forms of urban systems and settlements in Africa, how city authorities could use old and new methods of land administration to produce sustainable urban spaces in Africa, and the role of local activism is causing important changes in the built environment. Chapters are written by a diverse range of African scholars and practitioners in urban planning and policy design, environmental science and policy, sociology, agriculture, natural resources management, environmental law, and politics. Urban Africa has huge resource potential – both human and natural resources – that can stimulate sustainable development when effectively harnessed. Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa provides support for the SDGs in urban Africa and will be of interest to students and researchers, professionals and policymakers, and readers of urban studies, spatial planning, geography, governance, and other social sciences.

Alternative Urban Futures

Alternative Urban Futures PDF

Author: Raquel Pinderhughes

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780742523678

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Alternative Urban Futures challenges existing models of urban development and promotes alternative paradigms, processes, and technologies designed to fulfill human needs and limit the harmful impacts of human activities on the environment. The book focuses on how planners and policy makers can develop and manage essential urban infrastructures in ways that support sustainable development in the areas of waste management, water supply and management, energy production and use, building design and construction, land-use, transportation, and food systems. Each chapter features case studies that provide concrete examples of how ecologically and socially responsible urban and sustainable development planning and policy approaches have been successfully implemented in cities around the world. The book is especially effective in its emphasis on recently published statistics and writing supporting new planning and policy recommendations. Each chapter ends with a summary, accompanied by a list of questions that can be addressed with information provided in the text.

Resilience and Southern Urbanism

Resilience and Southern Urbanism PDF

Author: Binti Singh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-01-10

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1000557219

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This volume studies the urbanisation trends of medium-sized cities of India to develop a typology of urban resilience. It looks at historic second-tier cities like Nashik, Bhopal, Kolkata and Agra, which are laboratories of smart experiments and are subject to technological ubiquity, with rampant deployment of smart technologies and dashboard governance. The book examines the traditional values and systems of these cities that have proven to be resilient and studies how they can be adapted to contemporary times. It also highlights the vulnerabilities posed by current urban development models in these cities and presents best practices that could provide leads to address impending climate risks. The book also offers a unique Resilience Index that can drive change in the way cities are imagined and administered, customised to specific needs at various scales of application. Part of the Urban Futures series, the volume is an important contribution to the growing scholarship of southern urbanism and will be of interest to researchers and students of urban studies, urban ecology, urban sociology, architecture, geography, urban design, anthropology, cultural studies, environment, sustainability, urban planning and climate change.