Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development: Designing for Multispecies Justice

The term ‘sustainability’ has become an overused umbrella term that encompasses a range of climate actions and environmental infrastructure investments; however, there is still an urgent need for transformative reform work. Scholars of urban studies have made compelling cases for a more-than-human conceptualisation of urban and environmental planning and also share a common interest in translating theory into practical approaches and implications that recognise (i) our ecological entanglements with planetary systems and (ii) the urgent need for multispecies justice in the reconceptualisation of genuinely sustainable cities. More-than-human sensibility draws on a range of disciplines and encompasses conventional and non-conventional research methods and design approaches. In this article, we offer a horizon scan type of review of key posthuman and more-than-human literature sources at the intersection of urban studies and environmental humanities. The aim of this review is to (i) contribute to the emerging discourse that is starting to operationalise a more-than-human approach to smart and sustainable urban development, and; (ii) to articulate a nascent framework for more-than-human spatial planning policy and practice.

Green May Be Nice, but Infrastructure Is Necessary

Green infrastructure is presented as a novel and innovative approach in the current environmental planning discourse, but how new is it really? An historical overview of planning ideas in both the urban and the rural contexts indicates that the concept, if not the term, “green infrastructure” has a very long and distinguished pedigree in the field of landscape and open space planning. To determine how far the concept is indeed new, definitions of green infrastructure from the literature are examined. While “green” has long been loosely used as a synonym for natural features and vegetation in the planning context, “infrastructure” is the part of the term which is really novel. Infrastructure is otherwise understood as being either “technical” or “social”, and the common features of these otherwise very different forms are considered in order to gain a better understanding of how they might also relate to a new interpretation of green infrastructure. A number of international case studies of different “green infrastructure” projects are then presented, again to better understand their common features and potential relationship to other infrastructure types. Finally, the necessity to consider green and blue areas together and to take them as seriously as other forms of infrastructure is emphasized. The developing climate and biodiversity crises underline the urgency of implementing a flexible and multifunctional green-blue infrastructure system. This must be carefully integrated into the existing fabric of both urban and rural landscapes and will require an appropriately resourced administration and management system, reflecting its beneficial impacts.

Environmental Aspects of the European Experience in Landscape Planning

Understanding all the possibilities of environmentally oriented landscape planning will contribute to the effective environmental planning of the territory and nature management in general. Accordingly, the purpose of the study was to investigate the experience of the European countries towards the introduction of an effective system of environmentally oriented landscape planning and improvement of territories, as well as their protection. For this purpose, it is necessary to comprehensively study the strengths and weaknesses of existing developments in the field of environmentally oriented landscape planning in Europe. An analysis of the best practices of environmentally oriented landscape planning in such countries as Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. has been conducted. The findings allowed to state that the effectiveness of development and implementation of substantial planning for landscape design depends not only on the volume and depth of research, but to a very large extent from their reasonable and productive organisation. The paper summarises that in environmentally oriented landscape planning, it is first necessary to determine the reasons for planning. Before choosing the object and territory of planning, it is necessary to find out: who are the potential customers and investors – their goals and motivation; what are the problem situations and conflicts in nature management in the area; what is the practical use of the results of landscape planning; the purpose of the territory, including cartographic; the availability of source information, and more. And then make decisions regarding the stages of landscape planning, taking into account the environmental component and, accordingly, the implementation of the idea of landscape planning.

Input-Output Analysis

This essential reference for students and scholars in the input-output research and applications community has been fully revised and updated to reflect important developments in the field. Expanded coverage includes construction and application of multiregional and interregional models, including international models and their application to global economic issues such as climate change and international trade; structural decomposition and path analysis; linkages and key sector identification and hypothetical extraction analysis; the connection of national income and product accounts to input-output accounts; supply and use tables for commodity-by-industry accounting and models; social accounting matrices; non-survey estimation techniques; and energy and environmental applications. Input-Output Analysis is an ideal introduction to the subject for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in many scholarly fields, including economics, regional science, regional economics, city, regional and urban planning, environmental planning, public policy analysis and public management.

Investigation of Environmental and Biological Effects of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) with a Special Focus on Industrial and Mining Pollutions in Iran: A Review

The present article is a review study on the types of rare earth elements (REEs), environmental and biological effects as well as the sources of emission of these elements as pollution in nature. The purpose of this study is to provide a vision in environmental planning and control of pollution caused by REEs. The evaluation of rare earth elements was studied in human life and its environmental and biological effects, which have particular importance and are entering the life cycle through industrial and mining pollution sources. Since mining activities intensify the dispersion of these elements in the environment and the existence of industrial factories located around urban drainage system plays a unique role in creating and spreading pollution caused by rare earth elements; As a result, two case studies were conducted on two mining and industrial areas. The first case is the Choghart mine in Yazd province as an example of mining pollution,and the second case study is performed on the Kor river as an example of industrial pollution which is caused by industrial activities around it, Then the results are well explained to show both two environments of litho and hydro. Due to this fact that produced environmental pollution can cause exchange pollutant compounds with the surrounding environment besides its long-lasting destructive effects; It can cause irreversible biological effects on living organisms. By targeting this evaluation, several techniques can be proposed to prevent the entry and dispersal of rare earth elements from pollution sources besides methods to reduce the damage of these elements to the ecosystem.

Applications in remote sensing and environmental analysis

The present study aims to describe the morphologic and geographic structuring and report a relief morphometric analysis in a cutout of the environmental planning. To do so, geoprocessing techniques were widely used and supported by systemic theory. The main objective is to process relief data in Geographic Information System (GIS) and contribute to the database of characteristics from different local geomorphometric variables. Thus, the theorical basis of the research suggests the use of General System Theory based on their concepts to understand the morphologic structure of the relief at different levels, also the condition of the relief shapes and their classification. This case study occurs methodologically, defining the relief category as an environmental component of direct and vital interaction with other resources and dynamic components, considering mainly the whole environmental system. In this study, the environmental system is the Sucuriú River watershed. Therefore, to get the environmental analysis of the relief, the methodology consists of pre-processing and processing of digital land modeling data based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) records. Those can obtain different characteristics by using the methodology of geomorphometric variables extraction, which are the set of variables subject to land measuring. The results should cartographically reveal the dynamics and structural morphology of the relief, observing important parameters of relief configuration and concluding with the presentation and correlation of the relief shapes dynamics in all the considered environmental system.

A Multi-Stage Approach Combining Very High-Resolution Satellite Image, GIS Database and Post-Classification Modification Rules for Habitat Mapping in Hong Kong

Identification and mapping of various habitats with sufficient spatial details are essential to support environmental planning and management. Considering the complexity of diverse habitat types in a heterogeneous landscape, a context-dependent mapping framework is expected to be superior to traditional classification techniques. With the aim to produce a territory-wide habitat map in Hong Kong, a three-stage mapping procedure was developed to identify 21 habitats by combining very-high-resolution satellite images, geographic information system (GIS) layers and knowledge-based modification rules. In stage 1, several classification methods were tested to produce initial results with 11 classes from a WorldView-2/3 image mosaic using a combination of spectral, textural, topographic and geometric variables. In stage 2, modification rules were applied to refine the classification results based on contextual properties and ancillary data layers. Evaluation of the classified maps showed that the highest overall accuracy was obtained from pixel-based random forest classification (84.0%) and the implementation of modification rules led to an average 8.8% increase in the accuracy. In stage 3, the classification scheme was expanded to all 21 habitats through the adoption of additional rules. The resulting habitat map achieved >80% accuracy for most of the evaluated classes and >70% accuracy for the mixed habitats when validated using field-collected points. The proposed mapping framework was able to utilize different information sources in a systematic and controllable workflow. While transitional mixed habitats were mapped using class membership probabilities and a soft classification method, the identification of other habitats benefited from the hybrid use of remote-sensing classification and ancillary data. Adaptive implementation of classification procedures, development of appropriate rules and combination with spatial data are recommended when producing an integrated and accurate map.

Assessing the Co-Movements between Electricity Use and Carbon Emissions in the GCC area: Evidence from a Wavelet Coherence Method

This paper investigates the association between CO2 emissions and a range of factors, including electricity consumption, economic growth, urbanization, and trade openness for six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using data covering the 1965-2019 period. Namely, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. Contrasting with the standard literature, our empirical strategy uses the wavelet coherence approach on the frequency domain, thought to complement the time-series econometric procedures reported on this topic. Supplied at the country-level, associated evidence presents far-reaching policy recommendations whose applications may directly benefit environmental planning and bring high information value for the sake of sustainable energies in the Gulf region.JEL: Q43, C22, C23, E20, O44.

People, Projects, Organizations, and Products: Designing a Knowledge Graph to Support Multi-Stakeholder Environmental Planning and Design

As the need for more broad-scale solutions to environmental problems is increasingly recognized, traditional hierarchical, government-led models of coordination are being supplemented by or transformed into more collaborative inter-organizational networks (i.e., collaboratives, coalitions, partnerships). As diffuse networks, such regional environmental planning and design (REPD) efforts often face challenges in sharing and using spatial and other types of information. Recent advances in semantic knowledge management technologies, such as knowledge graphs, have the potential to address these challenges. In this paper, we first describe the information needs of three multi-stakeholder REPD initiatives in the western USA using a list of 80 need-to-know questions and concerns. The top needs expressed were for help in tracking the participants, institutions, and information products relevant to the REDP’s focus. To address these needs, we developed a prototype knowledge graph based on RDF and GeoSPARQL standards. This semantic approach provided a more flexible data structure than traditional relational databases and also functionality to query information across different providers; however, the lack of semantic data expertise, the complexity of existing software solutions, and limited online hosting options are significant barriers to adoption. These same barriers are more acute for geospatial data, which also faces the added challenge of maintaining and synchronizing both semantic and traditional geospatial datastores.