Urban Sustainability: Policy and Praxis PDF Download

Author: Jay D. Gatrell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319262181
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book explores the environmental, economic, and socio-political dynamics of sustainability from a geographic perspective. The chapters unite the often disparate worlds of environment, economics, and politics by seeking to understand and visualize a range of sustainability practices on the ground and in place. In concert, the book provides an overview of a range of geotechnical applications associated with environmental change (water resources, land use & land cover change); as well as investigates more nuanced and novel examples of local economic development in cities. The diverse collection maps local practices from urban farming to evolving and thriving industries such as metal scrapping and craft beer. Additionally, the book provides an integrated geo-technical framework for understanding and assessing ecosystem services, explores the deployment of unmanned systems to understand urban environmental change, interrogates the spatial politics of urban green movements, examines the implications of revised planning practices, and investigates environmental justice. The book will be of interest to researchers, students, and anyone seeking to better understand sustainability at multiple scales in urban environments.

Author: Vanesa Castán Broto
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 178699495X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Urban Sustainability and Justice presents an innovative yet practical approach to incorporate equity and social justice into sustainable development in urban areas, in line with the commitments of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. This work proposes a feminist reading of just sustainabilities' principles to reclaim sustainability as a progressive discourse which informs action on the ground. This work will help the committed activist (whether they are on the ground, working in a community, in a non-governmental organization (NGO), in a business, at a university, in any sphere in government) to connect their work to international efforts to deliver environmental justice in cities around the world. Drawing on a comparative, international analysis of sustainability initiatives in over 200 cities, Castán Broto and Westman find limited evidence of the implementation of just sustainabilities principles in practice, but they argue that there is considerable potential to develop a justice-oriented sustainability agenda. Highlighting current successes while also assessing prospects for the future, the authors show that just sustainabilities is not merely an aspirational discourse, but a frame of reference to support radical action on the ground.

Author: Susannah Bunce
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317443713
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Sustainability Policy, Planning and Gentrification in Cities explores the growing convergences between urban sustainability policy, planning practices and gentrification in cities. Via a study of governmental policy and planning initiatives and informal, community-based forms of sustainability planning, the book examines the assemblages of actors and interests that are involved in the production of sustainability policy and planning and their connection with neighbourhood-level and wider processes of environmental gentrification. Drawing from international urban examples, policy and planning strategies that guide both the implementation of urban intensification and the planning of new sustainable communities are considered. Such strategies include the production of urban green spaces and other environmental amenities through public and private sector and civil society involvement. The resulting production of exclusionary spaces and displacement in cities is problematic and underlines the paradoxical associations between sustainability and gentrified urban development. Contemporary examples of sustainability policy and planning initiatives are identified as ways by which environmental practices increasingly factor into both official and informal rationales and enactments of social exclusion, eviction and displacement. The book further considers the capacity for progressive sustainability policy and planning practices, via community-based efforts, to dismantle exclusion and displacement and encourage social and environmental equity and justice in urban sustainability approaches. This is a timely book for researchers and students in urban studies, environmental studies and geography with a particular interest in the growing presence of environmental gentrification in cities.

Author: Kimberly Etingoff
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1771883197
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. Two trends come together in the world’s cities to make urban sustainability a critical issue today. First, greater and greater numbers of people are living in urban areas—and are projected to do so for the foreseeable future. Additionally, cities contribute to climate change in a significant way and must make systemic changes to mitigate and adapt to climate change effects. Urban planners face serious challenges in enhancing sustainability but also have an important set of tools available for creating innovative solutions. This book adds to the conversation about the place of urban planning in the creation and maintenance of sustainable cities.

Author: Ralph Horne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131739108X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Urban sustainability citizenship situates citizens as social change agents with an ethical and self-interested stake in living sustainably with the rest of Earth. Such citizens not only engage in sustainable household practices but respect the importance of awareness raising, discussion and debates on sustainability policies for the common good and maintenance of Earth’s ecosystems. Sustainability Citizenship in Cities seeks to explain how sustainability citizenship can manifest in urban built environments as both responsibilities and rights. Contributors elaborate on the concept of urban sustainability citizenship as a participatory work-in-progress with the aim of setting its practice firmly on the agenda. This collection will prompt practitioners and researchers to rethink contemporary mobilisations of urban citizens challenged by various environmental crises, such as climate change, in various socio-economic settings. This book is a valuable resource for students, academics and professionals working in various disciplines and across a range of interdisciplinary fields, such as: urban environment and planning, citizenship as practice, environmental sociology, contemporary politics and governance, environmental philosophy, media and communications, and human geography.

Author: David Simon
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447332849
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Sustainable urbanization has moved to the forefront of political debate and policy agendas for numerous reasons. Among the most important are a growing appreciation both of the implications of rapid urbanization now occurring in China, India, and many other low and middle income countries with historically low urbanization levels and of the related challenges posed to urban areas worldwide by climate and environmental change. Conceptualizing urban sustainability for this new era, this compact book makes a clear contribution to the sustainable urbanization agenda through authoritative interventions that contextualize, assess, and explain the importance of three central characteristics of sustainable towns and cities everywhere: that they should be fair, green, and accessible.

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030944456X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
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.

Author: Simon Joss
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137006374
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Interest in the sustainable city is growing around the world and with it come important questions about governing sustainable urban development. Why are there blockages to achieving the goal of a sustainable city? How is it possible to overcome the practical difficulties that initiatives often face? And how can an increasingly technocratic focus be rebalanced with more of a public perspective? In this wide-ranging text, Simon Joss examines mainstream policy and practice and looks at the approaches that can overcome some of their drawbacks. The author examines the core elements of sustainable planning, and how processes of innovation, governance and policy-making work together to achieve sustainable urban change. He assesses the various challenges faced at both the domestic and international level, and across a range of urban scales. These challenges include how to resolve environmentally problematic ways of city-living at the same time as providing for urban social and economic development, and how to adapt the idea and reality of the sustainable city to different geopolitical contexts. The author recognizes that there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution and examines the range of methods available. In an era where entirely new eco-cities are being built and established ones being retro-fitted in response to environmental pressures, this text looks at the varying successes of the urban sustainability movement and its relationship to the planners, policy-makers and citizens who are inseparable from it. Providing an accessible account of the latest developments in research and policy as well as examples from around the world, this is indispensable reading for students, researchers and practitioners alike.

Author: Robert W. Orttung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429759789
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Capital Cities and Urban Sustainability examines how capital cities use their unique hub resources to develop and disseminate innovative policy solutions to promote sustainability. Cities are taking a leading role in defining a sustainable future at a time when national, state, and regional governments in several countries do not provide sufficient leadership. Capital cities stand out among cities as likely leading drivers in the effort to empower sustainable innovation as they provide a hub for connecting a variety of key constituencies. While acknowledging the successes capital cities have achieved, the international, multi-disciplinary contributors to this work discuss how there is room to do more and improve. The promotion of specific sustainability policies in crucial areas such as clean water provision, high tech innovation, public procurement contracting, and improving flood control in capital cities is examined through various global case studies. The examples range from relatively rich capital cities, such as Copenhagen, where the well-financed hub would be expected to succeed in generating sustainable policies, to poorer cities such as Phnom Penh, where such an optimistic outcome can seem less likely.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309313465
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
The workshop was convened to explore the region's approach to urban sustainability, with an emphasis on building the evidence base upon which new policies and programs might be developed. Participants examined how the interaction of various systems (natural and human systems; energy, water, and transportation systems) affected the region's social, economic, and environmental conditions. The objectives of the workshop were as follows: - Discuss ways that regional actors are approaching sustainability- specifically, how they are attempting to merge environmental, social, and economic objectives. - Share information about ongoing activities and strategic planning efforts, including lessons learned. - Examine the role that science, technology, and research can play in supporting efforts to make the region more sustainable. - Explore how federal agency efforts, particularly interagency partnerships, can complement or leverage the efforts of other key stakeholders. Pathways to Urban Sustainability: A Focus on the Houston Metropolitan Region: Summary of a Workshop was designed to explore the complex challenges facing sustainability efforts in the Houston metropolitan region and innovative approaches to addressing them, as well as performance measures to gauge success and opportunities to link knowledge with action. In developing the agenda, the planning committee chose topics that were timely and cut across the concerns of individual institutions, reflecting the interests of a variety of stakeholders. Panelists were encouraged to share their perspectives on a given topic; however, each panel was designed to provoke discussion that took advantage of the broad experience of the participants.