Grounding Urban Natures

Grounding Urban Natures PDF

Author: Henrik Ernstson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0262353172

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Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing. Contributors Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker

Urban Design Ecologies

Urban Design Ecologies PDF

Author: Brian McGrath

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-01-14

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0470974052

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Der Urban Design Ecologies Reader stellt Architekten und Stadtplanern wichtige Tools zum besseren Verständnis heutiger städtebaulicher Maßnahmen bereit. Essays führender Experten spannen den Bogen zwischen historischen Entwicklungen und innovativen Ansätzen zur Bewältigung der globalen Herausforderungen rasanter Urbanisierungsprozesse und des Klimawandels. Die neuesten Ansätze in den Bereichen Stadtentwicklung, darunter Kernkonzepte wie Stadtarchitektur, Architektur großer Metropolen (Stichwort "Großarchitektur"), Wucherung der Städte, Megastädte (oder die informelle Stadt) und Metastädte, die von digitalen Technologien und dem Ökologiegedanken getragen werden, werden im Detail erörtert.

Urban Ecologies on the Edge

Urban Ecologies on the Edge PDF

Author: Kristian Karlo Saguin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0520382641

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Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manila's dense urban region with fish and water while operating as a sink for its stormflows and wastes. Transforming the lake to deliver these multiple urban ecological functions, however, has generated resource conflicts and contradictions that unfold unevenly across space. In Urban Ecologies on the Edge, Kristian Karlo Saguin tracks the politics of resource flows and unpacks the narratives of Laguna Lake as Manila's resource frontier. Provisioning the city and keeping it safe from floods are both frontier-making processes that bring together contested socioecological imaginaries, practices, and relations. Combining fieldwork and historical accounts, Saguin demonstrates how people—powerful and marginalized—interact with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the city's edge.

Urban Ecology in the Global South

Urban Ecology in the Global South PDF

Author: Charlie M. Shackleton

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 3030676501

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Against the background of unprecedented rates of urbanisation in the Global South, leading to massive social, economic and environmental transformations, this book engages with the dire need to understand the ecology of such settings as the foundation for fostering sustainable and resilient human settlements in contexts that are very different to the Global North. It does so by bringing together scholars from around the world, drawing together research and case studies from across the Global South to illustrate, in an interdisciplinary and comprehensive fashion, the ecology of towns and cities in the Global South. Framed using a social-ecological systems lens, it provides the reader with an in-depth analysis and understanding of the ecological dynamics and ecosystem services and disservices within the complex and rapidly changing towns and cities of the Global South, a region with currently scarce representation in most of the urban ecology literature. As such the book makes a call for greater geographical balance in urban ecology research leading towards a more global understanding and frameworks. The book embraces the complexity of these rapid transformations for ecological and environmental management and how the ecosystems and the benefits they provide shape local ecologies, livelihood opportunities and human wellbeing, and how such knowledge can be mobilised towards improved urban design and management and thus urban sustainability.

Toward an Urban Ecology

Toward an Urban Ecology PDF

Author: Kate Orff

Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC

Published: 2016-07-12

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1580934366

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Kate Orff, 2017 MacArthur Fellow, has an optimistic and transformative message about our world: we can bring together social and ecological systems to sustainably remake our cities and landscapes. Part monograph, part manual, part manife­sto, Toward an Urban Ecology reconceives urban landscape design as a form of activism, demonstrating how to move beyond familiar and increasingly outmoded ways of thinking about environmental, urban, and social issues as separate domains; and advocating for the synthesis of practice to create a truly urban ecology. In purely practical terms, SCAPE has already generated numerous tools and techniques that designers, policy makers, and communities can use to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the loss of biodiversity, the loss of social cohesion, and ecological degradation. Toward an Urban Ecology features numerous projects and select research from SCAPE, and conveys a range of strategies to engender a more resilient and inclusive built environment.

Urban Ecologies

Urban Ecologies PDF

Author: Christopher Schliephake

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-12-11

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 073919576X

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The term “urban ecology” has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together “urban ecology” with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Urban Ecology

Urban Ecology PDF

Author: Pramit Verma

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 0128207310

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Urban Ecology covers the latest theoretical and applied concepts in urban ecological research. This book covers the key environmental issues of urban ecosystems as well as the human-centric issues, particularly those of governance, economics, sociology and human health. The goal of Urban Ecology is to challenge readers’ thinking around urban ecology from a resource-based approach to a holistic and applied field for sustainable development. There are seven major themes of the book: emerging urban concepts and urbanization, land use/land cover change, urban social-ecological systems, urban environment, urban material balance, smart, healthy and sustainable cities and sustainable urban design. Within each section, key concepts such as monitoring the urbanization phenomena, land use cover, urban soil fluxes, urban metabolism, pollution and human health and sustainable cities are covered. Urban Ecology serves as a comprehensive and advanced book for students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers in urban ecology and urban environmental research, planning and practice. Includes global case studies from over 14 countries, providing a first-hand account of recent applications Covers the phenomena of sustainable transport, nutrient recovery and human health, among many others Examines environmental issues as well as social-ecological systems and governance

Urban Ecology and Intervention in the 21st Century Americas

Urban Ecology and Intervention in the 21st Century Americas PDF

Author: Allison M. Schifani

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-28

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 100029076X

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This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

The Ecology of Urban Habitats

The Ecology of Urban Habitats PDF

Author: Oliver Gilbert

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 9400908210

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This book is about the plants and animals of urban areas, not the urban fringe, not encapsulated countryside but those parts of towns where man's impact is greatest. The powerful anthropogenic influences that operate in cities have, until recently, rendered them unattractive to ecologists who find the high proportion of exotics and mixtures of planted and spontaneous vegetation bewildering. They are also unused to considering fashion, taste, mowing machines and the behaviour of dog owners as habitat factors. I have always maintained, however, and I hope this book demonstrates, that there are as many interrelationships to be uncovered in a flower bed as in a field, in a cemetery as on a sand dune; and due to the well documented history of urban sites, together with the strong effects of management, they are frequently easier to interpret than those operating in more natural areas. The potential of these communities as rewarding areas for study is revealed in the literature on the pests of stored products, urban foxes and birds. The journals oflocal natural history societies have also provided a rich source of material as amateurs have never been averse to following the fortunes of their favourite groups into the heart of our cities. It is predictable that among the few professionals to specialize in this discipline have been those enclosed in West Berlin, who must be regarded as among the leading exponents of urban ecology.

Ecologies of Urbanism in India

Ecologies of Urbanism in India PDF

Author: Anne M. Rademacher

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9888139770

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Essays follow rapidly proliferating and resource-intensive Indian urbanism in everyday environments. Case studies on nature conservation in cities, urban housing and slum development, waste management, urban planning, and contestations over the quality of air, water, and sanitation in Delhi and Mumbai illuminate urban ecology per?spectives throughout the twentieth century. The collection highlights how struggles over the environment and one's quality of life in urban centers are increasingly framed in terms of their future place in a landscape of global sustainability. The text brings historical particularity and ethnographic nuance to questions of urban ecology and offers novel insight into theoretical and practical debates on urbanism and sustainability.