Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities

Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities
Author: Eric S. Zeemering
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2014-05-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135130752

Baltimore, like many other cities around the globe, is redesigning local government policy and programs in order to become a more sustainable city. Sustainability, as a concept guiding public action, encourages city officials to integrate policy and programs addressing the economic, environmental, and social health of the community. City governments, including Baltimore, have adopted plans to integrate this new priority into local policy and program management. Reorienting city policy and programs to address an emergent concern like sustainability requires collaboration between city government and various actors and organizations in the community. Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities examines how cities define sustainability and form policy implementation networks to integrate sustainability into city programs. Using the city of Baltimore to describe and analyze the involvement of the participants in local sustainability efforts in rich detail, Eric S. Zeemering argues that when we think about the sustainable city, the city government is not the best unit of analysis for our investigations or policy planning. Instead, policy networks within cities carve out slices of a sustainability agenda, define sustainability in their own ways, and form implementation networks with city government officials, neighborhood and community organizations, funders, and state and federal agencies in order to achieve specific goals. When cities begin to integrate sustainability into policies and programs, surveying and understanding competing definitions of sustainability within the community may be central to their success. The book’s rich array of data, including qualitative data from elite interviews and public documents, Q-methodology and social network analysis will make for an engaging read to scholars of political science or public affairs as well as the interested citizen or policy advocate.

Planning, Development and Management of Sustainable Cities

Planning, Development and Management of Sustainable Cities
Author: Tan Yigitcanlar
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3038979066

The concept of ‘sustainable urban development’ has been pushed to the forefront of policymaking and politics as the world wakes up to the impacts of climate change and the destructive effects of the Anthropocene. Climate change has emerged to be one of the biggest challenges faced by our planet today, threatening both built and natural systems with long-term consequences, which may be irreversible. While there is a vast body of literature on sustainability and sustainable urban development, there is currently limited focus on how to cohesively bring together the vital issues of the planning, development, and management of sustainable cities. Moreover, it has been widely stated that current practices and lifestyles cannot continue if we are to leave a healthy living planet to not only the next generation, but also to the generations beyond. The current global school strikes for climate action (known as Fridays for Future) evidences this. The book advocates the view that the focus needs to rest on ways in which our cities and industries can become green enough to avoid urban ecocide. This book fills a gap in the literature by bringing together issues related to the planning, development, and management of cities and focusing on a triple-bottom-line approach to sustainability.

Sharing Cities

Sharing Cities
Author: Duncan McLaren
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2015-11-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262029723

The future of humanity is urban, and the nature of urban space enables, and necessitates, sharing -- of resources, goods and services, experiences. Yet traditional forms of sharing have been undermined in modern cities by social fragmentation and commercialization of the public realm. In Sharing Cities, Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman argue that the intersection of cities' highly networked physical space with new digital technologies and new mediated forms of sharing offers cities the opportunity to connect smart technology to justice, solidarity, and sustainability. McLaren and Agyeman explore the opportunities and risks for sustainability, solidarity, and justice in the changing nature of sharing. McLaren and Agyeman propose a new "sharing paradigm," which goes beyond the faddish "sharing economy" -- seen in such ventures as Uber and TaskRabbit -- to envision models of sharing that are not always commercial but also communal, encouraging trust and collaboration. Detailed case studies of San Francisco, Seoul, Copenhagen, Medellín, Amsterdam, and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) contextualize the authors' discussions of collaborative consumption and production; the shared public realm, both physical and virtual; the design of sharing to enhance equity and justice; and the prospects for scaling up the sharing paradigm though city governance. They show how sharing could shift values and norms, enable civic engagement and political activism, and rebuild a shared urban commons. Their case for sharing and solidarity offers a powerful alternative for urban futures to conventional "race-to-the-bottom" narratives of competition, enclosure, and division.

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.

Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities

Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities
Author: Patrick M. Condon
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2012-09-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1610910591

A step-by-step guide to more synthetic, holistic, and integrated urban design strategies, Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities is a practical manual to accomplish complex community design decisions and create more green, clean, and equitable communities. The design charrette has become an increasingly popular way to engage the public and stakeholders in public planning, and Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities shows how citizens and officials can use this tool to change the way they make decisions, especially when addressing issues of the sustainable community. Designed to build consensus and cooperation, a successful charrette produces a design that expresses the values and vision of the community. Patrick Condon outlines the key features of the charrette, an inclusive decision-making process that brings together citizens, designers, public officials, and developers in several days of collaborative workshops. Drawing on years of experience designing sustainable urban environments and bringing together communities for charrettes, Condon’s manual provides step-by-step instructions for making this process work to everyone’s benefit. He translates emerging sustainable development concepts and problem-solving theory into concrete principles in order to explain what a charrette is, how to organize one, and how to make it work to produce sustainable urban design results.

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

Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities

Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities
Author: Patrick M. Condon
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2012-02-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1597268208

Questions of how the design of cities can respond to the challenge of climate change dominate the thoughts of urban planners and designers across the U.S. and Canada. With admirable clarity, Patrick Condon responds to these questions. He addresses transportation, housing equity, job distribution, economic development, and ecological systems issues and synthesizes his knowledge and research into a simple-to-understand set of urban design recommendations. No other book so clearly connects the form of our cities to their ecological, economic, and social consequences. No other book takes on this breadth of complex and contentious issues and distills them down to such convincing and practical solutions.

Rethinking Environmental Justice in Sustainable Cities

Rethinking Environmental Justice in Sustainable Cities
Author: Heather E. Campbell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135128502

As the study of environmental policy and justice becomes increasingly significant in today’s global climate, standard statistical approaches to gathering data have become less helpful at generating new insights and possibilities. None of the conventional frameworks easily allow for the empirical modeling of the interactions of all the actors involved, or for the emergence of outcomes unintended by the actors. The existing frameworks account for the "what," but not for the "why." Heather E. Campbell, Yushim Kim, and Adam Eckerd bring an innovative perspective to environmental justice research. Their approach adjusts the narrower questions often asked in the study of environmental justice, expanding to broader investigations of how and why environmental inequities occur. Using agent-based modeling (ABM), they study the interactions and interdependencies among different agents such as firms, residents, and government institutions. Through simulation, the authors test underlying assumptions in environmental justice and discover ways to modify existing theories to better explain why environmental injustice occurs. Furthermore, they use ABM to generate empirically testable hypotheses, which they employ to check if their simulated findings are supported in the real world using real data. The pioneering research on environmental justice in this text will have effects on the field of environmental policy as a whole. For social science and policy researchers, this book explores how to employ new and experimental methods of inquiry on challenging social problems, and for the field of environmental justice, the authors demonstrate how ABM helps illuminate the complex social and policy interactions that lead to both environmental justice and injustice.

Managing the Sustainable City

Managing the Sustainable City
Author: Genie N. L. Stowers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317509889

We hear the term “sustainability” everywhere today. In the context of city management, the term often refers to environmental concerns, both locally and globally. Managing the Sustainable City examines not only how cities can prepare to weather the local effects of climate change, but also how urban centers can sustain themselves through other modern management challenges, including budgeting and finance, human resource management, public safety, and infrastructure. This clearly written and engaging new textbook provides a comprehensive overview of urban administration today, exploring the unique demographics of cities, local government political structures, intergovernmental relations, and the full range of service delivery areas for which cities are ever more responsible. Throughout the book, two important components of city management today—the use of technology and measuring performance for accountability—are highlighted, along with NASPAA accreditation standards and competencies. Particular attention is paid to incorporating Urban Administration standards to provide students using the text will have a thorough understanding of: The ethics of local government management The roles and relationships among local and elected/appointed government officials, as well as what makes local institutions different from other institutions Strategies for engaging citizens in local governance The complexities of intergovernmental and network relationships to develop skills in collaborative governance How to manage local government financial resources as well as human resources Public service values such as accountability, transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, ethical behavior, and equity and emphasized throughout the text, and discussion questions, exercises, and "career pathways" highlighting successful public servants in a variety of city management roles are included in each chapter. Managing the Sustainable City is an ideal textbook for students of public administration, public policy, and public affairs interested in learning how cities can be sustainable—in their management, their policies, and their interactions with their citizens—as well as in preparing for and managing the impacts of climate change.

Sustainable Development Strategies

Sustainable Development Strategies
Author: Mousumi Roy
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-08-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0128189215

Sustainable Development Strategies: Engineering, Culture and Economics provides policy guidance on good practice in developing and implementing strategies for sustainable development. The book integrates social, economic and environmental objectives, taking into account of their implications for different socioeconomic groups and for future generations. It examines and analyzes existing and new approaches to formulating a sustainable development strategy and its implementation through both quantitative and qualitative studies. In addition, it looks at the formulation of strategy and overcoming various issues from the standpoint of a diverse set of disciplines, including engineering, economics and social/political views. - Clearly explains the most cutting-edge green technologies and methods for use in built communities - Analyzes existing and new approaches to formulating a sustainable development strategy and its implementation - Helps to facilitate the formulation of effective sustainability strategies through an interdisciplinary approach