The Evolution of Urban Form in Portland and Toronto: implications for sustainability planning

This paper analyses the evolution of urban form in two North American metropolitan regions (Portland and Toronto) and asks how more sustainable regional form might come about in the future in these and other urban areas. In the past, dominant patterns of urban form have emerged in such regions at different historical periods. These morphological phases include mid 19th-century grids, streetcar suburb grids, garden suburbs, automobile suburbs and New Urbanist neighbourhoods (which have only recently made an appearance and may or may not become widespread). Judging by the performance of past types of urban morphology, five design values appear particularly important for more sustainable urban form in the future: compactness, contiguity, connectivity, diversity and ecological integration. Although these principles were not well supported by 20th-century development, contemporary movements such as the New Urbanism and Smart Growth re-emphasise them. The example of these two regions indicates that, in the absence of new technological, economic or geographical forces, public sector institutions and urban social movements represent the most likely means to bring about new, more sustainable types of urban form.     

The deep city: cultural heritage as a resource for sustainable local transformation

ABSTRACT

The sustainable city of the future is typically envisioned as smart, creative and disruptive, assuming that urban and local sustainability is achieved through new technology and innovation. However, considering that the built environments of our cities and surroundings are highly durable, there is also a need to focus on how resources brought from the past – histories, artefacts and places – may be used for promoting urban sustainability. We label this a “deep city” perspective on urban and local transformation. By looking at Røros, a World Heritage Site in central Norway with a dense and historic wooden urban centre, we investigate how its heritage protection facilitates the maintenance of a compact urban centre. We hold that a shared sense of place – the deepness– may serve as a resource against unsustainable sprawl and mall-oriented development.     

The urban growth machine goes South: Conditions and capacities for more sustainable place-building

Abstract

The prospects for global sustainable development are thoroughly tied to the future of cities. Our goal is to better understand how cities actually get built and with what substantive consequences. Beyond designing and implementing public policy tools, this requires a better understanding of the underlying political economy of urban place-building. Beginning with the ideal type of the urban growth machine, we outline frameworks for analysing both the ‘conditions for urban place-building’ and the ‘capacities for sustainable urban place-building’. We apply these in the Chilean context by examining general features of the urban political economy and then specific development exemplars from the urban region of Valparaíso. We outline frameworks for further comparative work.     

Neighbourhood - Open Space Relationships in Metropolitan Planning: A look across four scales of concern

New Urbanism and other metropolitan planning strategies may discount the importance of neighbourhood - open space relationships when dealing with some types of open spaces, particularly in city centre and urban fringe areas. In this paper I review a series of studies I have carried out over the past decade looking at people's perceptions and uses of urban open space. This research examined neighbourhood - open space relationships in the metropolitan area of Chicago, Illinois, USA at four scales of concern: quasi-public space within an immediate neighbourhood; a public park that spans different neighbourhoods; regional greenways; and a metropolitan bioreserve. In all of this work, my findings show how adjacent neighbourhoods are critical to the success of these open spaces, regardless of their scale. Lessons are drawn from each scale for how neighbourhood - open space relationships might be improved.     

Smart Growth in a Small Urban Setting: The challenges of building an acceptable solution

Smart growth policies direct development towards existing communities already served by roads, sewer systems and other infrastructure. The increased development in these communities in turn should enable them to benefit from a stronger tax-base, more efficient use of their schools and other public facilities, and the renewed economic vitality of their urban centres. These goals and objectives appear to complement and support the efforts of urban mayors to attract new property tax rateables and better-paying jobs, but they may conflict with the desires of residents to reduce densities and improve the quality of life. We use a visual GIS-based model to assist five small contiguous older suburbs individually and collectively to evaluate their current redevelopment plans and to understand the implications of their land-use decisions on the quality of life in their communities. By bringing them together as a group, and our raising broader redevelopment and impact issues, they have begun to rethink how these properties could be best used to meet the community's needs and to see them in the context of similar redevelopment plans within their mini-region. One of the changes emerging is a greater role for certain types of residential development and a concurrent reduction in the amount of commercial space being considered. The authors would like to thank the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for funding this project, the Somerset County Planning Board and mayors of the five towns for actively supporting and participating in the study and the Regional Planning Partnership for its co-operation and assistance in refining its GOZ model to promote regional planning from the bottom up. The authors accept full responsibility for the ideas and recommendations in this report.     

“Coal is in our food,coal is in our blood”: everyday environmental injustices of rural community gardening in Central Appalachia

ABSTRACT

Central Appalachia's historical dependence on natural resource extraction industries has contributed to a long history of under- and uneven development, including trends of persistent poverty, cycles of unemployment, weakened local governance, environmental degradation, and severe social inequalities relative to the rest of the nation. Though these trends have been well documented at structural and community-levels, scholarship is more limited in assessing how the conditions of natural resource dependency may shape the everyday experiences of those who live in such regions and how those everyday experiences may illuminate challenges for future development. Employing an embedded case study design, this study examines how everyday environmental injustices may be experienced via community gardening activities, a sustainable development-oriented activity celebrated in urban locations but largely unexplored in rural environments. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 43 gardening programme coordinators and participants, the findings demonstrate that everyday environmental injustices are experienced across four distinct, yet overlapping and mutually reinforcing, dimensions: natural, built, human health, and socioeconomic environments. These factors in turn constrain programme participation and beneficial programme outcomes, particularly for more disadvantaged households that are affected by chronic illness, geographic isolation, and environmental hazards. Although the interviewees viewed many of these challenges as further justification for pursuing grassroots initiatives like community gardening programmes, these constraints also interacted in a way that limited the success of these locally-oriented sustainable development efforts, particularly for individuals who are the most socially, economically, and environmentally marginalised.     

Challenges of Urban and Regional Carbon Management and the Scientific Response

Abstract

How urbanization unfolds in the text few decades and which urban development path we choose are potentially critical to the efforts aimed at stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. However, our understanding of urban, as a unit or system, and its cross-scale linkages in the context of carbon management is at infancy state. In this context, this article outlines, the key challenges and introduces a new scientific initiative - Urban and Regional Carbon Management Initiative of the Global Carbon Project, which has raised key scientific questions with the aim to find reasonable answers. This article mainly showcases key science questions, past activities and future outlook with the aim to reach out to the related scientific and policy communities.     

The promise of smart grids

ABSTRACT

It is the promise of smart grids – their anticipated role in meeting economic, social, environmental policy objectives – that is driving action on smart grids worldwide, while the reality is rather more messy. This paper is about the implementation of smart grids in Australia, and examines the degree to which environmental and social promises have materialised (or not) within two large energy smart grid initiatives undertaken in the period 2009–2014: the federal government-sponsored Smart Grid Smart City Program and the State of Victoria’s Advanced Metering Infrastructure Program. The analysis draws on a governmentality approach to examine how the promise of smart grids has not for the most part been delivered, concentrating in particular on how new digital technologies have not “behaved” in the way originally planned. Within a governmentality framework, it is generally assumed that technologies work to support government programmes, to accomplish governance. But growing evidence points to smart grid technologies undermining the promise of smart grids. Such a finding stands at odds with the assumption in governmentality about technologies doing work in consort with rationalities of government.     

Increasing uptake of low impact urban design and development: The role of sustainability assessment systems

Abstract

‘Market transformation’ of the significant urban development industry towards more sustainable practices is not moving at great pace. Design and assessment systems that may promote uptake of more sustainable urban design and development are reviewed briefly followed by a comparison between building and neighbourhood scales. For the latter there is a dearth of design and assessment tools for the residential built environment and of indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development. Local authorities increasingly require an integrated approach to data collection and inclusion of infrastructure service providers in design, assessment and monitoring of urban development and associated environmental effects. By examining attempts to increase uptake of more sustainable residential development, the potential for tools and indicators at the neighbourhood scale to reduce environmental impact of the built environment is highlighted. It is recommended that built environment initiatives need to be combined with research into behavioural changes to achieve the desired outcome of a sustainable built environment and to increase the dialogue between communities, developers and local authorities.     

Marine protected areas and local coastal conservation and management in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper presents as case studies some New Zealand local government sustainable development initiatives in cleaner production and civic building design. From a series of structured interviews with key players, it describes key motivators and demotivators and puts these in the context of behaviour change theory. These enable a set of actions for local government to be developed that, if applied, could result in an advancement of the sustainable development agenda. However, other critical factors are given that are external to these actions and on which their overall success is dependent. In reviewing these factors as a group we conclude that far greater understanding of the partnership formation process and its dynamic in engendering successful sustainable development decision-making processes is crucial to move beyond the rhetoric of partnerships and enter the more complex and difficult world of truly participatory approaches.     

Liberalising environmental governance and the hazards of democratisation

This paper aims to initiate a debate through which the gap between rhetoric and the local-level implementation of sustainable development might be addressed. It seeks to contribute towards a conceptual as well as a practical basis for the understanding of what contribution sustainable development can make in the context of the post-apartheid reconstruction of South African cities. The analysis draws on an examination of the incorporation of sustainable development in post-apartheid policy as it relates to the urban environment, and its implications for implementation as experienced by formal (local government) and informal (community groups) local-level institutions. In order to ensure that capacity exists for the implementation of sustainable development, it is argued that this rethinking of sustainable development should be informed by the present transformation of formal and informal institutions, whilst the transformation of institutions should occur in a manner that reflects these new conceptual understandings.     

Views of the City: Multiple pathways to sustainable transport futures

In this paper we look behind the notion of sustainable transport and highlight the tensions and contradictions between the different ways of achieving this. The paper examines transportation plans for a major UK city and describes how these develop the idea and practice of sustainable transport and demand management along three quite distinct trajectories. By focusing on both the technological and the institutional dimensions of three different routes to sustainable transport, the analysis explicates the different ways in which the urban transport problem is framed, the different socio-technical logics of demand management embodied in the plans and the differing ways in which institutional relationships are (re)constituted. A key finding is that technological and institutional innovations are inversely related so that radical technological innovation often serves to reinforce existing social relations of power and exclusion. The conclusion drawn is that the choice is not just between a sustainable and an unsustainable transport future, but also between different forms of sustainability.     

Civic modes of greening the city? Urban natures in-between familiar engagement and green critique

ABSTRACT

In this article, we deploy the loosely bounded phenomenon of “urban green communities” – in the shape of urban gardening, beekeeping, food collectives, biodiversity enhancement, tree planting and kindred citizen-based group practices towards urban greening – in order to probe the wide variations in modes of civic engagement with urban sustainability politics. As such, we explore the conceptual gaps opened up in-between everyday lifestyle politics, green social movements and critiques of neoliberal urban political economies, by leveraging a novel and fine-grained conceptualization of civic and place-based material participation built from pragmatic sociology. The work of Laurent Thévenot on regimes of engagement, in particular, allow us to trace translations in-between the familiar attachments and the public critiques undertaken by urban green communities in ways that expand the frame on socio-material politics relative to current research conversations. Empirically, we leverage this re-conceptualization as part of a comprehensive digital mapping exercise set in Denmark, in which we trace core patterns and differences in modes of urban-green politics at the level of everyday citizen practices and group interaction styles across a diversity of urban green communities. Having identified six such civic modes of urban greening and specified their group styles of engagement, we end by discussing the implications of our findings for questions of care, justice and democracy in sustainable city-making.     

Thinking Habits into Action: The role of knowledge and process in questioning household consumption practices

Despite occupying a central place in the sustainable development paradigm, calls for individuals in high-income countries to adopt patterns of sustainable consumption have failed to gain ground in the past decade. The low uptake of public messages that emphasise links between the environment and the home are caused by a plethora of 'barriers to action', which range from individual circumstances to public norms and structures. This article argues that in addition to these barriers, consideration of how individuals read and react to sustainable consumption information is important. Based on interviews with participants of a sustainable behaviour change programme called Action at Home, this article considers both how, and in what form, knowledge is mobilised when individuals rethink their personal practices. Using Giddens' structuration theory, a framework is presented. This framework emphasises the importance of 'known' or 'local' information, as well as discursive processes, in addressing individual consumption practices and argues that a 'cultural politics' of sustainable consumption needs to be factored into on-going academic and policy debates.     

Sense and sustainability: The case of the Slow City movement

Abstract

In this article I draw on recent anthropological literature on the senses to propose a novel approach to sustainable local development. I suggest that attention to how the senses are engaged in both discourses concerning and corporeal experiences of sustainable urban development, can produced insights into how these processes operate. In developing the discussion I draw from examples from ethnographic research in British member towns of the Cittàslow (Slow City) movement.     

Bicycle-sharing systems in an alternative/diverse economy perspective: a sympathetic critique

ABSTRACT

This contribution puts bicycle-sharing systems (BSSs) as a rather recent, environmentally friendly form of urban mobility in the context of broader societal changes. More specifically, we discuss to what extent BSS and their various modes of organisation can be regarded as an “alternative” consumption practice, explicitly designed to deliver more social just outcomes, taking the diverse economy framework of Gibson-Graham as a key tool of analysis. Our examination unfolds a range of limitations of BSSs for (strong) sustainable development, but also a number of obvious and less obvious prospects and opportunities.     

Community-based participatory research: Changing scientific practice from research on communities to research with and for communities

The Agenda 21 treaty adopted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development set out new goals for the provision and management of information in a sustainable society. New information and communications technologies (ICTs) have the potential to be used as tools for managing information and consequently have a role in sustainable development. This paper considers the use of ICTs to manage local information areas and the extent to which these new technologies are compatible with the broader goals of Agenda 21 such as social inclusion and public participation in decision making. The use of the World Wide Web by local authorities in the UK to manage local information and promote Agenda 21 is explored through a critique of website contents. It is concluded that, although the use of ICTs is not incompatible with the broader aims of Agenda 21, and has many possible positive applications, current use of the World Wide Web by local government in the UK does not yet fulfil this potential.     

Social sustainability and neighbourhood design: an investigation of residents' satisfaction in Delhi

Social and environmental goals are often mutually reinforcing. Urban forms may encourage social sustainability as well as social inclusion or may have the potential to create areas of crime and social exclusion. The issues of relationship between sustainable development and urban form have given birth to new paradigms of design approach such as new urbanism, the compact city and the eco-city. This paper examines the impact of urban form on social sustainability at the neighbourhood level. It seeks to better understand the relationship between urban form and social sustainability by comparing three neighbourhoods with dissimilar urban forms in Delhi, India. Household surveys and observation surveys in these three neighbourhoods were conducted, and it was found that the urban form of a neighbourhood plays a very important role in creating a socially sustainable residential neighbourhood. The study established that social interactions within the communities are higher when dwelling units are placed around the public realm or common open space. The study demonstrated that provision of high quality and well-located open space at the precinct level, mixed land use and good accessibility to the public realm and social infrastructure play an important role in increasing the social sustainability of the neighbourhood.     

Hyperautomobility and Governmentality in Auckland

Abstract

A number of cities around the world are associated with very high levels of private motor car usage, and Auckland provides an example of one of these ‘hyperautomobile’ cities. There are many problems with this system of transportation and dependence on the private car, including environmental, social and city design dimensions. Though there is a clear aspiration to move towards reduced levels of car usage in the city's transport and spatial planning strategies, there are major difficulties in implementation terms. We develop and consider future scenarios to 2041 to reduce these levels of motorization, and subsequent transport CO₂ emissions, with a much greater use of public transport, walking and cycling, urban planning, and low emission vehicles. The current implementability of such a ‘sustainable mobility’ future is however questioned in the current political and social context, and critically debated in terms of the available governance mechanisms and the limited attempts to shape the behaviour of the public. We conclude by calling for a reconsideration of the policy measures being considered, including the range and levels of application and investment; with a much wider framing of the transport planning remit, and carried out within a much stronger participatory framework for decision-making.