Sustainability

Author(s):  
Emily Talen

This article discusses sustainability, one of the key objectives of urban planning. It provides an overview of what is believed to be consensus thinking concerning what sustainable places are and reviews the generalized principles of sustainable cities. The article highlights the disagreements among planners about the parameters, effects, and implementation strategies necessary. It argues that scholarship and research on sustainable urbanism are still needed to define more specific parameters, to understand and work to offset perverse effects, and to figure out ways to more effectively implement the essential objectives.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Elias Bibri

AbstractIn recent years, it has become increasingly feasible to achieve important improvements of sustainability by integrating sustainable urbanism with smart urbanism thanks to the proven role and synergic potential of data-driven technologies. Indeed, the processes and practices of both of these approaches to urban planning and development are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism, giving rise to a new phenomenon known as “data-driven smart sustainable urbanism.” Underlying this emerging approach is the idea of combining and integrating the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities and harnessing the synergies of their strategies and solutions in ways that enable sustainable cities to optimize, enhance, and maintain their performance on the basis of the innovative data-driven technologies offered by smart cities. These strengths and synergies can be clearly demonstrated by combining the advantages of sustainable urbanism and smart urbanism. To enable such combination, major institutional transformations are required in terms of enhanced and new practices and competences. Based on case study research, this paper identifies, distills, and enumerates the key benefits, potentials, and opportunities of sustainable cities and smart cities with respect to the three dimensions of sustainability, as well as the key institutional transformations needed to support the balancing of these dimensions and to enable the introduction of data-driven technology and the adoption of applied data-driven solutions in city operational management and development planning. This paper is an integral part of a futures study that aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. I argue that the emerging data-driven technologies for sustainability as innovative niches are reconfiguring the socio-technical landscape of institutions, as well as providing insights to policymakers into pathways for strengthening existing institutionalized practices and competences and developing and establishing new ones. This is necessary for balancing and advancing the goals of sustainability and thus achieving a desirable future.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilson Levy Braga da Silva Neto ◽  
José Renato Nalini

<p class="Default">O tema “cidades inteligentes e sustentáveis” que está no topo da agenda pública de debates sobre planejamento urbano condensa uma multiplicidade de sentidos e que tangencia as atuais fronteiras, partindo do horizonte reflexivo da área. Busca-se avançar em direção à construção dos conceitos relacionados ao tema de forma a contribuir para o fornecimento de subsídios para o avanço teórico da área de planejamento urbano e regional no Brasil. O texto será dividido em duas partes. A primeira discorrerá sobre os desafios conceituais do tema, tentando identificar as vozes e os discursos por trás da ideia de “cidades inteligentes e sustentáveis”. Este primeiro item tentará responder à pergunta: é possível, hoje, extrair uma unidade conceitual mínima em torno dessa ideia? Qual?</p><p class="Default"><span><br /></span></p><p>The theme of "smart and sustainable cities" at the top of the public agenda of debates on urban planning condenses a multiplicity of meanings and that touches current boundaries, starting from the reflective horizon of the area. It seeks to advance towards the construction of concepts related to the theme in order to contribute to the provision of subsidies for the theoretical advancement of urban and regional planning in Brazil. The text will be divided into two parts. The first will discuss the conceptual challenges of the theme, trying to identify the voices and discourses behind the idea of "smart and sustainable cities". This first item will attempt to answer the question: is it possible today to extract a minimal conceptual unity around this idea? What?</p><p class="Default"><span><br /></span></p>


This chapter will delve on modern approaches to city making (eco-cities, sustainable cities, resilient cities, etc.) explaining their basics and complexity. Additionally, the demands that changing solutions place on the architects, urban planners, and other city designers will be explained. The scope should be treated as the introduction to the circular economy approach; it will also cover other development attitudes where a city was not the initial prime element even if urban planning became one of the main issues during later phases of development. Such attitudes can be traced in the mid-20th century policy making with the car transport being the leading development attitude but having a wide impact on the solutions used in most cities. It will also explain when the urbanization process became part of this economic approach. The chapter will include principles of the modern initiatives in various parts of the world and consider existing movements allowing for a more sweeping coverage.


2022 ◽  
pp. 257-267
Author(s):  
María Jesús Garcia García

The protective actions of rehabilitation, especially when they affect urban spaces formally declared as areas of rehabilitation, must have an urban reflection and be projected and reflected in the corresponding planning and management techniques. Planning legislation provides the instruments (plans) and the proper techniques to make urban planning adjusted to the parameters of the rehabilitation performing actions that seek to promote the rational use of the natural and cultural resources, in particular the territory, the soil, and the urban and architectural heritage that are the support, the object, and the scene of the quality of life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (8) ◽  
pp. 1779-1796 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rapoport ◽  
Anna Hult

This article examines the international travels of ideas about sustainable urban planning and design through a focus on private sector architecture, planning and engineering consultants. These consultants, who we refer to as the global intelligence corps (GIC), package up their expertise in urban sustainability as a marketable commodity, and apply it on projects around the world. In doing so, the global intelligence corps shape norms about what constitutes ‘good’ sustainable urban planning, and contribute to the development of an internationalised travelling model of sustainable urbanism. This article draws on a broad study of the industry (GIC) in sustainable urban planning and design, and two in-depth case studies of Swedish global intelligence corps firms working on Chinese Eco-city projects. Analysis of this material illustrates how the global intelligence corps’s work shapes a traveling model of sustainable urbanism, and how this in turn creates and reinforces particular norms in urban planning practice.


Author(s):  
Beatriz Valcárcel-Aguiar ◽  
Pilar Murias ◽  
Alexandre Vecino-Aguirre

AbstractThe aim of liveable, sustainable cities has become one of the major challenges for urban planning. However, achieving both goals at the same time is no easy task, particularly when liveability and sustainability may be defined by certain elements that tend to be in conflict. The main goal of this work is to analyse the relationship between liveability and environmental sustainability within the context of Spanish urban spaces. To this end, we propose two synthetic indicators: one for liveability and the other for urban environmental sustainability. Each of these indicators is constructed using a technique based on goal programming. A bivariate analysis is carried out using these indicators, which allows us to compare the extent to which Spanish cities are liveable and sustainable. This analysis should be useful for urban planners when taking and implementing policy decisions. By comparing cities with similar profiles using a benchmarking system, it becomes possible to judge the margin for improvement in one attribute without detriment to the other. This benchmarking system also allows us to reveal the specific dimensions of liveability or sustainability for which there is the greatest opportunity for improvement.


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