The Sustainable City

The Sustainable City
Author: Steven Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231551703

Living sustainably is not just about preserving the wilderness or keeping nature pristine. The transition to a green economy depends on cities. Economic, technological, and cultural forces are moving people out of rural areas and into urban areas. If we are to avert climate catastrophe, we will need our cities to coexist with nature without destroying it. Urbanization holds the key to long-term sustainability, reducing per capita environmental impacts while improving economic prosperity and social inclusion for current and future generations. The Sustainable City provides a broad and engaging overview of the urban systems of the twenty-first century. It approaches urban sustainability from the perspectives of behavioral change, organizational management, and public policy, looking at case studies of existing legislation, programs, and public-private partnerships that strive to align modern urban life and sustainability. The book synthesizes the disparate strands of sustainable city planning in an approachable and applicable guide that highlights how these issues touch our lives on a daily basis, including the transportation we take, the public health systems that protect us, where our energy comes from, and what becomes of our food waste. This second edition of The Sustainable City dives deeper into the financing of sustainable infrastructure and initiatives and puts additional emphasis on the roles that individual citizens and varied stakeholders can play. It also reviews current trends in urban inequality and discusses whether a model of sustainability that embraces a multidimensional approach to development and a multistakeholder approach to decision making can foster social inclusion. It features many more examples and new international case studies spanning the globe.

The Key to Sustainable Cities

The Key to Sustainable Cities
Author: Gwendolyn Hallsmith
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2003-09-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1550923978

Most of the world’s population now live in cities, but despite wide agreement on the core values of sustainable societies, municipalities are so busy solving current problems, they don’t have the time or resources to plan effective action for sustainability. The Key to Sustainable Cities uses the principles of system dynamics to demonstrate how today’s problems were yesterday’s solutions. The book points to a new approach to city planning that builds on assets as a starting point for cities to develop healthy social, governance, economic, and environmental systems. Gwendolyn Hallsmith has worked to build sustainable communities for over twenty years as a municipal manager, a regional planning director, and with the Institute for Sustainable Communities. She lives in Marshfield, Vermont.

Sustainable Communities Design Handbook

Sustainable Communities Design Handbook
Author: Woodrow W. Clark II
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2010-07-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0080963366

The objective of Sustainable Communities Design Handbook is to ensure a better quality of life for everyone, both now and for generations to come. This means creating a better and safer environment internationally through the sustainable use of natural resources, encouraging sustainable development which supports a strong economy, and ensuring a high quality environment that can be enjoyed by all. Sustainable Development Partnerships brings together in one reference today's most cutting edge technologies and methods for creating sustainable communities. With this book, Environmental Engineers, Civil Engineers, Architects, Mechanical Engineers, and Energy Engineers find a common approach to building environmental friendly communities which are energy efficient. The five part treatment starts with a clear and rigorous exposition of sustainable development in practice, followed by self-contained chapters concerning applications. Methods for the sustainable use of natural resources in built communities Clearly explains the most cutting edge sustainable technologies Provides a common approach to building sustainable communities Coverage of sustainable practices from architecture to construction

Planning Sustainable Cities

Planning Sustainable Cities
Author: Spiro N. Pollalis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317282760

Planning Sustainable Cities: An infrastructure-based approach provides an analytical framework for urban sustainability, focusing on the services and performance of infrastructure systems. The book approaches infrastructure as a series of systems that function in synergy and are directly linked with urban planning. This method streamlines and guides the planning process, while still highlighting detail, each infrastructure system is decoded in four "system levels". The levels organize the processes, highlight connections between entities and decode the high-level planning and decision making process affecting infrastructure. For each system level strategic objectives of planning are determined. The objectives correspond to the five focus areas of the Zofnass program: Quality of life, Natural World, Climate and Risk, Resource Allocation, Leadership. Developed through the Zofnass Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, this approach integrates the key infrastructure systems of Energy, Landscape, Transportation, Waste, Water, Information and Food and explores their synergies through land use planning, engineering, economics and policy. The size and complexity of infrastructure systems means that multiple stakeholders facing their own challenges and agendas are involved in planning; this book creates a common, collaborative platform between public authorities, planners, and engineers. It is an essential resource for those seeking Envision Sustainability Professionals accreditation.

Energizing Sustainable Cities

Energizing Sustainable Cities
Author: Arnulf Grübler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1849714398

The twenty-first century will be increasingly urban.

Dimensions of the Sustainable City

Dimensions of the Sustainable City
Author: Mike Jenks
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2009-12-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1402086474

The CityForm consortium’s latest book, Dimensions of the Sustainable City, is the first book to report on an empirical multi-disciplinary study specifically designed to address urban sustainability. Drawing together the various dimensions of sustainability – economic, social, transport, energy and ecological – the book examines their relationships both to each other and to urban form. The book investigates the sustainability dimensions of cities through a series of projects based on a common list of elements of urban form, and which draw on the consortium’s latest research to review the sustainability issues of each dimension. The elements of urban form include density, land use, location, accessibility, transport infrastructure and characteristics of the built environment. The book also addresses issues such as adapting cities, psychological and ecological benefits of green space and sustainable lifestyles, each presenting a critical review of the relevant literature followed by an empirical analysis presenting the key results. Based on studies across five UK cities, the book draws out findings of relevance to sustainable cities worldwide. As well as an invaluable reference to researchers in sustainable planning and urban design, the book will provide a useful text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses and for policy makers dealing with these issues. The CityForm consortium is a multi-disciplinary group of researchers from five universities funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council from 2003-07.

Pathways to Urban Sustainability

Pathways to Urban Sustainability
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0309444535

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.

Rethinking Sustainable Cities

Rethinking Sustainable Cities
Author: David Simon
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-08-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1447332849

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.

Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future

Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future
Author: Simon Elias Bibri
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 685
Release: 2018-02-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319739816

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.