Download or read book Green Infrastructure for Sustainable Urban Development in Africa written by John Abbott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows for the first time how green infrastructure can work in an African urban context. On one level it provides a major rethinking of the role of infrastructure in urban society since the creation of networked infrastructure in the early twentieth century. On another, it explores the changing paradigms of urban development through the fundamental question of how decisions are made. With a focus on Africa's fast-growing secondary towns, where 70 per cent of the urban population live, the book explains how urban infrastructure provides the key to the relationship between economic development and social equity, through the mediation of natural resources. Adopting this view enables investment to be channelled more effectively to provide the engine for economic growth, while providing equitable services for all residents. At the same time, the mediation of resource flows integrates the metabolism of the city into the wider ecosystem. This vision leads to a new way of thinking about infrastructure, giving clear definition to the concept of green infrastructure. On the basis of research gathered throughout an extensive career, John Abbott draws in particular from his experience in Ethiopia to demonstrate the ways in which infrastructure needs to respond to the economies, societies and natural environments of twenty-first century urban Africa.
Download or read book Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa written by Michael Addaney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa provides a variety of conventional and emerging theoretical frameworks to inform understandings and responses to critical urban development issues such as urbanisation, climate change, housing/slum, informality, urban sprawl, urban ecosystem services and urban poverty, among others, within the context of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Africa. This book addresses topics including challenges to spatial urban development, how spatial planning is delivered, how different urbanisation variables influence the development of different forms of urban systems and settlements in Africa, how city authorities could use old and new methods of land administration to produce sustainable urban spaces in Africa, and the role of local activism is causing important changes in the built environment. Chapters are written by a diverse range of African scholars and practitioners in urban planning and policy design, environmental science and policy, sociology, agriculture, natural resources management, environmental law, and politics. Urban Africa has huge resource potential – both human and natural resources – that can stimulate sustainable development when effectively harnessed. Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa provides support for the SDGs in urban Africa and will be of interest to students and researchers, professionals and policymakers, and readers of urban studies, spatial planning, geography, governance, and other social sciences.
Download or read book Urban Vulnerability and Climate Change in Africa written by Stephan Pauleit and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-13 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urbanisation and climate change are among the major challenges for sustainable development in Africa. The overall aim of this book is to present innovative approaches to vulnerability analysis and for enhancing the resilience of African cities against climate change-induced risks. Locally adapted IPCC climate change scenarios, which also consider possible changes in urban population, have been developed. Innovative strategies to land use and spatial planning are proposed that seek synergies between the adaptation to climate change and the need to solve social problems. Furthermore, the book explores the role of governance in successfully coping with climate-induced risks in urban areas. The book is unique in that it combines: a top-down perspective of climate change modeling with a bottom-up perspective of vulnerability assessment; quantitative approaches from engineering sciences and qualitative approaches of the social sciences; a novel multi-risk modeling methodology; and strategic approaches to urban and green infrastructure planning with neighborhood perspectives of adaptation.
Download or read book Blue Green Infrastructure Across Asian Countries written by Shalini Dhyani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited book discusses Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) from conception to implementation in building resilience and urban sustainability. The book emphasizes on infrastructures, institutions, and perceptions as three main pillars of implementing and managing successful BGI, with a special focus on Asia. The book highlights concepts as well as field-based experiences from different parts of Asia by experts, with a special focus on advances and opportunities in advancing BGI, challenges and constraints, followed by case studies on BGI mainstreaming. It addresses sustainable water management, multiscale environmental design, environmental risk assessment, and finally understanding policy implications and concerns for BGI mainstreaming in growing urban sprawls of the region. There has been growing global momentum and recognition of Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) as a multifunctional Nature-based Solution (NbS) with multiple co-benefits. There is strong evidence from many urban centres of Europe, USA, China, and South Africa demonstrating that mainstreaming BGI can help in addressing growing vulnerability of urban areas by ensuring safety, resilience, and sustainability for urban residents in the warming world. This book is a timely contribution for researchers, students, scholars, urban planners, consultants, and policy makers in the fields of environment, resilience, urban planning, climate adaptation, and sustainability science.
Download or read book A framework for a green infrastructure planning approach in the Gauteng City Region written by Christina Culwick and published by Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO). This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the population, economy and urban built environment in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) expand, government is increasingly under pressure to provide urban infrastructure to support growth. It is increasingly important that this infrastructure is sustainable, minimising the negative environmental impacts often associated with traditional forms of urban development. Green Infrastructure (GI) is the interconnected set of natural and man-made ecological systems, green spaces and other landscape features that provide services and strategic functions in the same way as traditional infrastructure. In harnessing the benefits of ecosystem services, GI has emerged as a more efficient, cost effective and sustainable alternative – and sometimes accompanying approach – to conventional forms of infrastructure. Despite international evidence demonstrating how GI can be used as an alternative to, or in tandem with, traditional infrastructure, the GI approach has so far gained only limited traction in the GCR. In 2013 the GCRO published the State of Green Infrastructure in the GCR report. The report established the principles that underpin GI, used available data to map the extent of GI networks in the region, assessed to what extent municipalities were aware of and applying a GI approach, and demonstrated a possible way to value GI in local government financial systems. The conclusions of the State of Green Infrastructure report were used to guide the next phase of GCRO’s research in support of the adoption of GI approach – a phase focused on better understanding the opportunities for implementing GI in planning and infrastructure development programmes and on addressing some of the challenges associated with shifts towards this approach. A framework for a green infrastructure planning approach in the Gauteng City-Region, GCRO’s fourth Research Report, builds on the foundations laid in the State of Green Infrastructure report. It assembles expert inputs and reflections from collaborative stakeholder discussions in what was known as the Green Infrastructure CityLab to illustrate important considerations for the development of a GI planning approach in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR). The report is divided into three broad sections. Part A introduces the theoretical underpinnings of a GI approach and builds an argument for the importance of incorporating GI into planning and infrastructure development in the GCR. Part B presents three pieces written by external experts. They consider how GI and ecosystem services can be valued by municipalities, and how so-called ‘grey-green’ infrastructure design solutions can be implemented in the GCR. Part C reflects on the stakeholder engagement process that has been undertaken, primarily through the GI CityLab, to deepen understanding of how GI can be embedded in municipal practice. Based on these research findings, this report concludes with a strategy for GCRO’s next phase of work in its ongoing Green Assets and Infrastructure Project.
Download or read book Blue Green Infrastructure for Sustainable Urban Settlements written by P. K. Joshi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sustainable and Smart Spatial Planning in Africa written by Charles Chavunduka and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-04-24 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book clarifies the smart city concept that is gaining application in Sub – Saharan Africa. It shows how the smart concept can be used to address problems that would be difficult and more expensive to solve using traditional techniques such as employment creation. This is done through elaboration of the African interpretation of smartness, using tools for smart solid waste management, e-governance, smart energy, and smart infrastructure. The case studies selected, and each chapter explain a different dimension of the smart city concept and offer innovative solutions to problems of rapid urbanization. It lays the theoretical foundation for further research on smart cities and rural areas in Africa.
Download or read book Green Infrastructure and Urban Climate Resilience written by Keerththana Kumareswaran and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to cover most subject areas of green infrastructure such as components, multi-functionality, and integration to build environment, contribution to urban sustainability, sustainable and smart city development, urban climate change nexus, green buildings and rating systems, economic assessment, and quantification of green infrastructure. The impending climate crisis, as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted the importance of green infrastructure in and around cities, prompting a call for more functional and sustainable urban planning and design. A number of recent studies have shown that green infrastructure provides a wide range of ecosystem functions and services critical to human well-being and urban sustainability, which is especially important during climatic and health crises. In this book, the authors emphasize the importance of existing green infrastructure in coping with climate change-induced stresses, such as increasing climate variability and extreme temperature and precipitation events, as well as contributing to urban dwellers' physical and mental health. Green infrastructure, in both cases, plays a significant role in providing urban areas with resilience capacity, which is critical to urban sustainability. The authors also emphasize the importance of expanding and improving green infrastructure, particularly in vulnerable areas, through integrative and participatory processes. Appropriate integration of green-gray infrastructure and development of climate resilient cities is the core theme of this publication. Further, it emphasizes sustainable development which has become an imperative requirement to the world to move fore and climate change-built environment nexus, the most critical global crisis. Though several books were published globally on the green infrastructure and urban resilience individually, books are rarely published combining both disciplines. This book identifies and addresses the gap through comprehensively discussing on both interlinked areas which is essential for the sustainable urban development. Further, it explores on urban climate resilience, urban sprawl, urbanization, resilience drivers, essentials of city resilience, policy implications, challenges, and future perspectives. This book is a useful fundamental guide in practical applications of green infrastructure in built environment in sustainability context. Further, it enlightens on the significance of transforming the conventional building construction trend to sustainable urban planning designs and building development, exploring on the strategic pathway on building urban climate resilience while signifying the importance of healthy built environment through discussing on the nexus between climate change and built environment.
Download or read book Transformational Infrastructure for Development of a Wellbeing Economy in Africa written by Desta Mebratu and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African countries face unprecedented challenges of defining a future development pathway in a resource- and carbon-constrained world. This book addresses this challenge, with special reference to the set of infrastructure that most African countries require to meet the sustainable development goals and fulfil the aspirations of Agenda 2063. Infrastructure is a key factor that determines how resource and energy flow and transform through socio-economic systems. Decisions made today by African countries on their infrastructural configuration will determine the inclusivity, resource intensity and climate resilience of their development pathways for decades to come. This book is a product of a two‑year research conducted by a group of African scholars who have an extensive academic and practical experience on the development of key infrastructure sectors in Africa.
Download or read book Resilience and Sustainability in Urban Africa written by Innocent Chirisa and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resilience has become a very topical issue transcending many spheres and sectors of sustainable urban development. This book presents a resilience framework for sustainable cities and towns in Africa. The rise in informal settlements is due to the urban planning practices in most African cities that rarely reflect the realities of urban life and environment for urban development. Aspects of places, people and process are central to the concept of urban resilience and sustainable urban growth. It stems from the observation that urban vulnerability is on the increase in Zimbabwe and beyond. In history, disasters have adversely affected nations across the world, inflicting wide ranging losses on one hand while on the other hand creating development opportunities for urban communities. Cooperation in disaster management is a strategy for minimising losses and uplifting the affected urban settlements. The significance of urban planning and design in the growth and development of sustainable urban centres is well documented. Urbanisation has brought with it challenges that most developing countries such as Zimbabwe are not equipped to handle. This has been accompanied by problems such as overpopulation, overcrowding, shortages of resources and the growth of slum settlements. There need is to seriously consider urban planning and design in order to come up with contemporary designs that are resilient to current urban challenges. There are major gaps in urban resilience building for instance in Harare and the local authority needs to prioritise investment in resilient urban infrastructure.
Download or read book Towards applying a green infrastructure approach in the Gauteng City Region written by Christina Culwick and published by Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO). This book was released on 2019-12-11 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of heightened climate variability, thinking about ways to redesign our urban areas with more sustainable infrastructure solutions is becoming more and more important. Green infrastructure (GI) is emerging as an alternative approach to traditional (‘grey’) infrastructure in urban planning and development. Its emergence can be understood in terms of the growing demand for infrastructure and services, increased concerns over natural resource constraints and climate change, and the negative impacts associated with traditional approaches to designing and building cities. It has been proposed that GI can provide the same services as traditional infrastructure at a similar capital cost, while also providing a range of additional benefits. However, despite the increasing examples of successful urban GI applications, traditional infrastructure continues to dominate due to the lack of systematic evidence to support GI implementation. As a result, there has been an increase in calls from policy- and decision-makers for a greater evidence base on the benefits of GI, as well as for practical guidelines on its implementation. ‘Towards applying a green infrastructure approach in the Gauteng City-Region’ is the GCRO’s third report in its ongoing research into 'Green assets and infrastructure'. The first two reports in this project series were more theoretically grounded and policy-oriented, whereas this third report is more practical in nature. The first report explored the basic principles around GI, assessed the extent of ecological features in Gauteng and the way governments in the province think about planning and maintenance of green assets. The second report responded to some of the challenges identified in the first report, and in particular the importance of government officials and practitioners in exploring how international green infrastructure plans could be applied in the Gauteng context. This third report builds on the findings of the aforementioned reports and the project’s CityLab series, which highlighted the need to build an evidence base as critical for garnering support for and as well as enhancing investment in the GI approach. Unlike the more theoretically grounded earlier reports, this report comprises four technical sections and practical reflections on how a GI approach could be incorporated into urban planning in the GCR and in other similar urban contexts.
Download or read book Urban Environmental Education Review written by Alex Russ and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.
Download or read book African Cities Through Local Eyes written by Giuseppe Faldi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-16 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides readers with a wide overview of place-based planning and design experiments addressing such powerful transformations in the African built environment. This continent is currently undergoing fast paced urban, institutional and environmental changes, which have stimulated an increasing interest for alternative architectural solutions, urban designs and comprehensive planning experiments. The international and balanced array of the collected contributions explore emerging research concepts for understanding urban and peri-urban processes in Africa, discuss bottom-up planning and design practices, and present inspirational and innovative co-design methods and participatory tools for steering such change through public spaces, sustainable services and infrastructures. The book is intended for students, researchers, decision-makers and practitioners engaged in planning and design for the built environment in Africa and the Global South at large.
Download or read book Green Infrastructure written by Benedetta Giudice and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses international Green Infrastructure (GI) planning and design strategies. The GI strategy is widely recognized for its multifunctionality (as a tool for ecological, economic and social enhancement) and multiscalarity. Starting from this assumption, the book intends to implement the concept of GI and blue networks in planning strategies and their linked urban projects. New urban and regional paradigms of the latest years, such as urban sprawl, ecosystem services, biodiversity, urban resilience, climate change and health emergencies, have made it necessary to rethink cities and territories and their related plans and projects. To satisfy these paradigms, worldwide plans and projects have started to focus both on short-term and long-term processes and strategies which integrate environmental, landscape and ecological elements. Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Download or read book Green Infrastructure written by Ian C. Mell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our understandings of the landscapes around us are constantly changing. How we interact with, manage and value these spaces is important, as it helps us to ensure we live in attractive, functional and sustainable places. Green Infrastructure planning is the current ‘go-to’ approach in landscape planning that incorporates human-environmental interactions, understandings of ecology and how socio-cultural factors influence our use of parks, gardens and waterways. This book explores several interpretations of Green Infrastructure bringing together case studies of policy, practice, ecological change and community understandings of landscape. Focusing on how planning policy shapes our interactions with the landscape, as individuals and communities, the book discusses what works and what needs to be improved. It examines how environmental management can promote more sustainable approaches to landscape protection ensuring that water resources and ecological communities are not harmed by development. It also asks what the economic and community values of Green Infrastructure are to illustrate how different social, ecological and political factors influence how our landscapes are managed. The central message of the book focusses on the promotion of multi-functional nature within urban landscapes that helps people, the economy and the environment to meet the challenges of population, infrastructure and economic change. The chapters in this book were origianally published as a special issue in Landscape Research.
Download or read book Urban Green Infrastructure Planning Multifunctional Networks for Sustainable Urban Development written by Jingxia Wang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Geography of Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Africa written by Patrick Brandful Cobbinah and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a comprehensive look at several cases of climate change adaptation responses across various sectors and geographical areas in urban Africa and places them within a solid theoretical context. Each chapter is a state-of-the-art overview of a significant topic on climate change adaptation in urban Africa and is written by a leading expert in the field. In addition to the focus on the geography of urban adaptation to climate change in Africa, this collection offers a broader perspective by blending the use of case studies and theory based research. It examines transformations in climate change adaptation and its future orientation from the perspectives of urban planners, political economists, environmentalists, ecologists, economists and geographers, thereby addressing the challenges facing African cities adaptation responses from all angles. Providing up-to-date and authoritative contributions covering the key aspects of climate change adaptation in urban Africa, this book will be of great interest to policymakers, practitioners, scholars and students of geography, urban development and management, environmental science and policy, disaster management, as well as those in the field of urban planning.
