Download or read book Cities and Nature written by Lisa Benton-Short and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities and Nature illustrates how the city is part of the environment, and how it is subject to environmental constraints and opportunities. The city has been treated in geographical writings as only a social phenomena, and at the same time, environmental scientists have tended to ignore the urban. This book reconnects the science and social science through the examination of the urban. It critiques the dominant academic discourse which ignores the environmental base of urban life and living, and discusses the urban natural environment and how this is subjected to social influences. The book is organized around three central themes: urban environment in historical context issues in urban-nature relations realigning urban-nature relations. Ideas such as pollution as a physical environmental fact, often created or impacted by economic, cultural and political changes are discussed, as well as viewing pollution as a social act: consuming patterns of everyday activities - driving, showering, shopping, eating - and how this has an environmental impact. The authors reintroduce a social science perspective in examining urban nature, the city and its physical environment. Cities and Nature clearly illustrates the physical and social elements of the urban environment and shows how these are important to examining the city. It includes further reading and boxed case studies on Bangladesh, Paris, Delhi, Rome, Cubatao, Thailand, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Toronto. This book would be an asset to students and researchers in environmental studies, urban studies and planning.
Download or read book Nature and Cities written by Frederick R. Steiner and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A compilation of essays by leading international landscape architects, city planners, urban designers, and architects about the need for ecological urban design. Chapters explore the economic, environmental, and public health benefits of integrating nature more fully into cities, including urban green spaces, streetscapes, and buildings"--
Download or read book Cities and Natural Process written by Michael Hough and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This key book is a revised and updated discussion of the fundamental conflict in the perception of nature, and an expression of the essential need for an environmental view when approaching urban design. Whilst retaining the existing structure, each of the chapters has been revised to take into account recent theoretical and practical developments. A completely new concluding chapter has been added which draws together the themes of the volume and links these to broader landscape issues such as greenway systems, landscape ecology and green infrastructure.
Download or read book The Nature of Cities written by Michael Bennett and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are often thought to be separate from nature, but recent trends in ecocriticism demand that we consider them as part of the total environment. This new collection of essays sharpens the focus on the nature of cities by exploring the facets of an urban ecocriticism, by reminding city dwellers of their place in ecosystems, and by emphasizing the importance of this connection in understanding urban life and culture. The editorsÑboth raised in small towns but now living in major urban areasÑare especially concerned with the sociopolitical construction of all environments, both natural and manmade. Following an opening interview with Andrew Ross exploring the general parameters of urban ecocriticism, they present essays that explore urban nature writing, city parks, urban "wilderness," ecofeminism and the city, and urban space. The volume includes contributions on topics as wide-ranging as the urban poetry of English writers from Donne to Gay, the manufactured wildness of a gambling casino, and the marketing of cosmetics to urban women by idealizing Third World "naturalness." These essays seek to reconceive nature and its cultural representations in ways that contribute to understanding the contemporary cityscape. They explore the theoretical issues that arise when one attempts to adopt and adapt an environmental perspective for analyzing urban life. The Nature of Cities offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture. By bridging the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and urban experience, the book makes a statement of lasting importance to the development of the ecocritical movement. CONTENTS Part 1ÑThe Nature of Cities 1. Urban Ecocriticism: An Introduction, Michael Bennett & David Teague 2. The Social Claim on Urban Ecology, Andrew Ross (interviewed by Michael Bennett) Part 2ÑUrban Nature Writing 3. London Here and Now: Walking, Streets, and Urban Environments in English Poetry from Donne to Gay, Gary Roberts 4. "All Things Natural Are Strange": Audre Lorde, Urban Nature, and Cultural Place, Kathleen R. Wallace 5. Inculcating Wildness: Ecocomposition, Nature Writing, and the Regreening of the American Suburb, Terrell Dixon Part 3ÑCity Parks 6. Writers and Dilettantes: Central Park and the Literary Origins of Antebellum Urban Nature, Adam W. Sweeting 7. Postindustrial Park or Bourgeois Playground? Preservation and Urban Restructuring at Seattle's Gas Works Park, Richard Heyman Part 4ÑUrban "Wilderness" 8. Boyz in the Woods: Urban Wilderness in American Cinema, Andrew Light 9. Central High and the Suburban Landscape: The Ecology of White Flight, David Teague 10. Manufacturing the Ghetto: Anti-urbanism and the Spatialization of Race, Michael Bennett Part 5ÑEcofeminism and the City 11. An Ecofeminist Perspective on the Urban Environment, Catherine Villanueva Gardner 12. "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman": The Political Economy of Contemporary Cosmetics Discourse, Laura L. Sullivan Part 6ÑTheorizing Urban Space 13. Darwin's City, or Life Underground: Evolution, Progress, and the Shapes of Things to Come, Joanne Gottlieb 14. Nature in the Apartment: Humans, Pets, and the Value of Incommensurability, David R. Shumway 15. Cosmology in the Casino: Simulacra of Nature in the Interiorized Wilderness, Michael P. Branch
Download or read book Planning Cities with Nature written by Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores novel theories, strategies and methods for re-naturing cities. It enables readers to learn from best practice and advances the current theoretical and empirical understanding in the field. The book also offers valuable insights into how planners and policymakers can apply this knowledge to their own cities and regions, exploring top-down, bottom-up and mixed mechanisms for the systemic re-naturing of planned and existing cities. There is considerable interest in ‘naturalising’ cities, since it can help address multiple global societal challenges and generate various benefits, such as the enhancement of health and well-being, sustainable urbanisation, ecosystems and their services, and resilience to climate change. This can also translate into tangible economic benefits in terms of preventing health hazards, positively affecting health-related expenditure, new job opportunities (i.e. urban farming) and the regeneration of urban areas. There is, thus, a compelling case to investigate integrative approaches to urban and natural systems that can help cities address the social, economic and environmental needs of a growing population. How can we plan with nature? What are the models and approaches that can be used to develop more sustainable cities that provide high-quality urban green spaces?
Download or read book Biophilic Cities written by Timothy Beatley and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the "greening" of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And any vision of a sustainable urban future must place its focus squarely on nature, on the presence, conservation, and celebration of the actual green features and natural life forms. A biophilic city is more than simply a biodiverse city, says Beatley. It is a place that learns from nature and emulates natural systems, incorporates natural forms and images into its buildings and cityscapes, and designs and plans in conjunction with nature. A biophilic city cherishes the natural features that already exist but also works to restore and repair what has been lost or degraded. In Biophilic Cities Beatley not only outlines the essential elements of a biophilic city, but provides examples and stories about cities that have successfully integrated biophilic elements--from the building to the regional level--around the world. From urban ecological networks and connected systems of urban greenspace, to green rooftops and green walls and sidewalk gardens, Beatley reviews the emerging practice of biophilic urban design and planning, and tells many compelling stories of individuals and groups working hard to transform cities from grey and lifeless to green and biodiverse.
Download or read book Nature Next Door written by Ellen Stroud and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.
Download or read book Urbanizing Nature written by Tim Soens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity’s interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the more nature is said to be "urbanizing": turned into a resource, mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then striking back with a vengeance as "natural disaster". Confronting insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter teleological perspectives on the birth of modern "urban nature" as a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Nature of Cities written by Jennifer S. Light and published by . This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2009 Lewis Mumford Prize, Society for City and Regional Planning History In the early twentieth century, America was transformed from a predominantly agricultural nation to one whose population resided mostly in cities. Yet rural areas continued to hold favored status in the country’s political life. For prominent figures in the social sciences, city planning, and real estate who were anxious about the future of cities, this obsession with the agrarian past inspired a new campaign for urban reform. They called for ongoing programs of natural resource management to be extended to maintain and improve cities. Jennifer S. Light finds a new understanding of the history of urban renewal in the United States in the rise and fall of the American conservation movement. The professionals Light examines came to view America’s urban landscapes as ecological communities requiring scientific management on par with forests and farms. The Nature of Cities brings together environmental and urban history to reveal how, over four decades, this ecological vision shaped the development of cities around the nation.
Download or read book Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities written by Anne Rademacher and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors in this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously experienced sites of interplay between non-human life and materials, and daily human life experiences. Debates and efforts to recover nature in the city provoke moral and ethical evaluations of the human ecology of city life, and direct ecologies of urbanism into new avenues like aesthetics, care, perception, and stewardship. “This fascinating collection of essays brings together a series of cutting-edge insights into Asian cities caught in the maelstrom of global environmental change. A particular strength of this book is its commitment to forms of interdisciplinary dialogue and conceptual engagement that unsettle existing geographies of knowledge.” —Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge; author of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space “This impressive collection on urban ecologies moves beyond the anthropocentric city to expand our understanding of cities as multispecies spaces of active collaboration, decay, and regeneration, offering new possibilities for the flourishing of urban life—both human and non-human—and the design of more just and sustainable cities for all.” —Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside; author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam
Download or read book Green Cities written by Matthew E. Kahn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a green city? What does it mean to say that San Francisco or Vancouver is more "green" than Houston or Beijing? When does urban growth lower environmental quality, and when does it yield environmental gains? How can cities deal with the environmental challenges posed by growth? These are the questions Matthew Kahn takes on in this smart and engaging book. Written in a lively, accessible style, Green Cities takes the reader on a tour of the extensive economic literature on the environmental consequences of urban growth. Kahn starts with an exploration of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC)—the hypothesis that the relationship between environmental quality and per capita income follows a bell-shaped curve. He then analyzes several critiques of the EKC and discusses the implications of growth in urban population and surface area, as well as income. The concluding chapter addresses the role of cities in promoting climate change and asks how cities in turn are likely to be affected by this trend. As Kahn points out, although economics is known as the "dismal science," economists are often quite optimistic about the relationship between urban development and the environment. In contrast, many ecologists and environmentalists remain wary of the environmental consequences of free-market growth. Rather than try to settle this dispute, this book conveys the excitement of an ongoing debate. Green Cities does not provide easy answers complex dilemmas. It does something more important—it provides the tools readers need to analyze these issues on their own.
Download or read book Children Nature and Cities written by Claire Freeman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That children need nature for health and well-being is widely accepted, but what type of nature? Specifically, what type of nature is not only necessary but realistically available in the complex and rapidly changing worlds that children currently live in? This book examines child-nature definitions through two related concepts: the need for connecting to nature and the processes by which opportunities for such contact can be enhanced. It analyses the available nature from a scientific perspective of habitats, species and environments, together with the role of planning, to identify how children in cities can and do connect with nature. This book challenges the notion of a universal child and childhood by recognizing children’s diverse life worlds and experiences which guide them into different and complex ways of interacting with the natural world. Unfortunately not all children have the freedom to access the nature that is present in the cities where they live. This book addresses the challenge of designing biodiverse cities in which nature is readily accessible to children.
Download or read book Planning Wild Cities written by Wendy Steele and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically engages with the contemporary challenges and opportunities of wild cities in a climate of change. A key focus of the book is exploring the nexus of possibilities for wild cities and the eco-ethical imagination needed to drive sustainable and resilient urban pathways. Many now have serious doubts about the prospects for humanity to live within cities that are socially just and responsive to planetary limits. Is it possible for planning to better serve, protect and nurture our human and non-human worlds? This book argues it is. Drawing on international literature and Australian case examples, this book explores issues around climate change, colonization, urban (in)security and the rights to the city for both humans and nature. It is within this context that this book focuses on the urgent need to better understand how contemporary cities have changed, and the relational role of planning within it. Planning Wild Cities will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies, and sustainable development, and for all those invested in re-shaping our ‘wild’ city futures.
Download or read book Children Nature Cities written by Ann Marie F. Murnaghan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does the way we think about urban children and urban nature matter? This volume explores how dichotomies between nature/culture, rural/urban, and child/adult have structured our understandings about the place of children and nature in the city. By placing children and youth at the center of re-theorising the city as a socio-natural space, the book illustrates how children and youth's relations to and with nature can change adultist perspectives and help create more ecologically and socially just cities. As a key contribution to children's studies, the book engages and enlivens debates in urban political ecology and urban theory, which have not yet treated age as an important axis of difference. With examples from ten localities, the chapters in this volume ask how we can subvert both romanticized and modernist conceptualizations of nature and childhood that conflate innocence and purity with children and nature; the volume asks what happens when we re-invent urban natures with children's needs and perspectives in mind.
Download or read book Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems written by Peter Newman and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern city dwellers are largely detached from the environmental effects of their daily lives. The sources of the water they drink, the food they eat, and the energy they consume are all but invisible, often coming from other continents, and their waste ends up in places beyond their city boundaries. Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems shows how cities and their residents can begin to reintegrate into their bioregional environment, and how cities themselves can be planned with nature’s organizing principles in mind. Taking cues from living systems for sustainability strategies, Newman and Jennings reassess urban design by exploring flows of energy, materials, and information, along with the interactions between human and non-human parts of the system. Drawing on examples from all corners of the world, the authors explore natural patterns and processes that cities can emulate in order to move toward sustainability. Some cities have adopted simple strategies such as harvesting rainwater, greening roofs, and producing renewable energy. Others have created biodiversity parks for endangered species, community gardens that support a connection to their foodshed, and pedestrian-friendly spaces that encourage walking and cycling. A powerful model for urban redevelopment, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems describes aspects of urban ecosystems from the visioning process to achieving economic security to fostering a sense of place.
Download or read book Biophilic Cities for an Urban Century written by Robert McDonald and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that, paradoxically, at their moment of triumph and fastest growth, cities need nature more than ever. Only if our urban world is full of biophilic cities will the coming urban century truly succeed. Cities are quintessentially human, the perfect forum for interaction, and we are entering what could justly be called the urban century, the fastest period of urban growth in human history. Yet a growing body of scientific literature shows that the constant interaction, the hyper-connectedness, of cities leads to an urban psychological penalty. Nature in cities can be solution to this dilemma, allowing us to have all the benefits of our urban, connected world yet also have that urban home be a place where humanity can thrive. This book presents best practices and case studies from biophilic design, showing how cities around the world are beginning to incorporate nature into their urban fabric. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and professionals working in the area of sustainable cities.
Download or read book Nature Based Solutions for More Sustainable Cities written by Edoardo Croci and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature-Based Solutions for More Sustainable Cities makes a clear case of performances, impacts, and benefits generated by NBS in cities providing a comprehensive framework approach to understand the real and full potential of NBS at the urban level.
