Download or read book Small Town Sustainability written by Paul Knox and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age where the globalization process is threatening the uniqueness and vitality of small towns, and where most urban planning discourse is directed at topics such as metropol-regions or mega-regions and world cities, the authors here emphasize the need to critically reflect on the potential of small towns. They illustrate how small towns can meet the challenge of a fast-paced, globalized world, and based on case studies, movements, programs, and strategies, present the local cultures that effectively and sustainably promote traditions and identities. Small towns often play a critical role in regional economies. When small towns focus on their specific characteristics and exploit their opportunities, they can become stable niches within regional, national, and global economies, and thus contribute significantly to shaping their future. The second edition is expanded to cover the intensive development of small towns in China and Korea. In addition, the authors examine the impact of the economic crisis on small towns and the recent development of the Slow City movement.

Download or read book Planning Small and Mid Sized Towns written by Avi Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small and mid-sized suburban towns house two-thirds of the world’s population and current modes of planning for these municipalities are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Common approaches that have prevailed in past decades no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. Rather than dismissing small and mid-sized towns as unattractive suburban sprawl, Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns offers ideas and methods on how small isolated and edge towns can be designed and retooled into sustainable, affordable and adaptable communities. Coverage includes: the evolution of small towns mobility and connectivity neighborhood and sustainable dwelling design town centers and urban renewal economic sustainability and wealth generation, and more. With numerous case studies from North America and Europe and over 150 color photographs, maps, and illustrations, Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns is a valuable, practical resource for professional planners and urban designers, as well as students in these disciplines.

Download or read book International Immigration Integration and Sustainability in Small Towns and Villages written by Ricard Morén-Alegret and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings small places to the main stage in an exploration of the nature of immigration in rural areas and small towns in Europe. Extending recent efforts to study migration at a sub-national scale, the authors focus their analysis on non-metropolitan areas to consider how globalisation and modernisation processes are experienced at a local level. Morén-Alegret and Wladyka weave themes of livelihood, social participation, justice and equity into human and planetary sustainability debates, drawing on quantitative population data as well as qualitative information on challenges for rural and small town sustainability in four different European countries (Portugal, France, Spain and England). Highlighting the interlinked relationship between rural sustainability, migration and ethnic diversity, this research is a valuable resource for policy-makers and academics alike, with far-reaching implications across geography, sociology, political science, anthropology and environmental sciences.

Download or read book Small Gritty and Green written by Catherine Tumber and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How small-to-midsize Rust Belt cities can play a crucial role in a low-carbon, sustainable, and relocalized future. America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities—Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others—increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, small industrial cities seem to be part of America's past, not its future. And yet, Catherine Tumber argues in this provocative book, America's gritty Rust Belt cities could play a central role in a greener, low-carbon, relocalized future. As we wean ourselves from fossil fuels and realize the environmental costs of suburban sprawl, we will see that small cities offer many assets for sustainable living not shared by their big city or small town counterparts, including population density and nearby, fertile farmland available for new environmentally friendly uses. Tumber traveled to twenty-five cities in the Northeast and Midwest—from Buffalo to Peoria to Detroit to Rochester—interviewing planners, city officials, and activists, and weaving their stories into this exploration of small-scale urbanism. Smaller cities can be a critical part of a sustainable future and a productive green economy. Small, Gritty, and Green will help us develop the moral and political imagination we need to realize this.

Download or read book Green Metropolis written by David Owen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes. A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

Download or read book Pathways to Urban Sustainability written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Strong Towns written by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

Download or read book Degrowth in the Suburbs written by Samuel Alexander and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new urban imaginary, that of degrowth suburbia, which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.

Download or read book Dimensions of the Sustainable City written by Mike Jenks and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-12-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Our Towns written by James Fallows and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BEST SELLER • The basis for the HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

Download or read book Sustainable Communities Design Handbook written by Woodrow W. Clark and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2010-07-03 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Ecovillages written by Jonathan Dawson and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Planning Development and Management of Sustainable Cities written by Tan Yigitcanlar and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Growing Greener Cities written by Eugenie L. Birch and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-02 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted described his most famous project, the design of New York's Central Park, as "a democratic development of highest significance." Over the years, the significance of green in civic life has grown. In twenty-first-century America, not only open space but also other issues of sustainability—such as potable water and carbon footprints—have become crucial elements in the quality of life in the city and surrounding environment. Confronted by a U.S. population that is more than 70 percent urban, growing concern about global warming, rising energy prices, and unabated globalization, today's decision makers must find ways to bring urban life into balance with the Earth in order to sustain the natural, economic, and political environment of the modern city. In Growing Greener Cities, a collection of essays on urban sustainability and environmental issues edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, scholars and practitioners alike promote activities that recognize and conserve nature's ability to sustain urban life. These essays demonstrate how partnerships across professional organizations, businesses, advocacy groups, governments, and individuals themselves can bring green solutions to cities from London to Seattle. Beyond park and recreational spaces, initiatives that fall under the green umbrella range from public transit and infrastructure improvement to aquifer protection and urban agriculture. Growing Greener Cities offers an overview of the urban green movement, case studies in effective policy implementation, and tools for measuring and managing success. Thoroughly illustrated with color graphs, maps, and photographs, Growing Greener Cities provides a panoramic view of urban sustainability and environmental issues for green-minded city planners, policy makers, and citizens.

Download or read book Culture and Sustainability in European Cities written by Svetlana Hristova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European cities are contributing to the development of a more sustainable urban system that is capable of coping with economic crises, ecological challenges and social disparities in different nation-states and regions throughout Europe. This book reveals in a pluralistic way how European cities are generating new approaches to their sustainable development, and the special contribution of culture to these processes. It addresses both a deficit of attention to small and medium-sized cities in the framework of European sustainable development, and an underestimation of the role of culture, artistic expression and creativity for integrated development of the city as a prerequisite to urban sustainability. On the basis of a broad collection of case studies throughout Europe, representing a variety of regionally specific cultural models of sustainable development, the book investigates how participative culture, community arts, and more generally, creativity of civic imagination are conducive to the goal of a sustainable future of small and medium-sized cities. This is an essential volume for researchers and postgraduate students in urban studies, cultural studies, cultural geography and urban sociology as well as for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the specificity of European cities as hubs of innovation, creativity and artistic industriousness.

Download or read book Small Actions Big Difference written by CB Bhattacharya and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite dire warnings about global warming, carbon emissions by the world’s largest companies are increasing and only a few companies have strategies for managing carbon emissions and water resources. So what separates the best from the rest? In one word, the answer is ownership: companies that are winning at sustainability have created the conditions for their stakeholders to own sustainability and reap the benefits that come with deeper experience with and ownership of social and environmental issues: a happier, more productive workforce, increased customer loyalty, higher stock valuations, and greater long-term profits. Based on interviews with 25 global multinational corporations as well as employees, middle managers, and senior leaders across multiple sectors, this is the first book to connect sustainability to the theory and principles of psychological ownership and to propose a succinct, easy-to-digest model for managerial use. Watch the author talking about the themes in the book at the TedX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XpmsD2b76U

Download or read book Urban Sustainability Transitions written by Niki Frantzeskaki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s population is currently undergoing a significant transition towards urbanisation, with the UN expecting that 70% of people globally will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation has multiple political, cultural, environmental and economic dimensions that profoundly influence social development and innovation. This fundamental long-term transformation will involve the realignment of urban society’s technologies and infrastructures, culture and lifestyles, as well as governance and institutional frameworks. Such structural systemic realignments can be referred to as urban sustainability transitions: fundamental and structural changes in urban systems through which persistent societal challenges are addressed, such as shifts towards urban farming, renewable decentralised energy systems, and social economies. This book provides new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in different types of cities across the world and explores possible strategies for governing urban transitions, emphasising the co-evolution of material and institutional transformations in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. With case studies of mega-cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Adelaide, medium-sized cities such as Copenhagen, Cape Town and Portland, and nonmetropolitan cities such as Freiburg, Ghent and Brighton, the book provides an opportunity to reflect upon the comparability and transferability of theoretical/conceptual constructs and governance approaches across geographical contexts. Urban Sustainability Transitions is key reading for students and scholars working in Environmental Sciences, Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Policy and Planning.