The Hidden Wealth of Cities

The Hidden Wealth of Cities PDF Author: Jon Kher Kaw
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464814937
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Book Description
In every city, the urban spaces that form the public realm—ranging from city streets, neighborhood squares, and parks to public facilities such as libraries and markets—account for about one-third of the city’s total land area, on average. Despite this significance, the potential for these public-space assets—typically owned and managed by local governments—to transform urban life and city functioning is often overlooked for many reasons: other pressing city priorities arising from rapid urbanization, poor urban planning, and financial constraints. The resulting degradation of public spaces into congested, vehicle-centric, and polluted places often becomes a liability, creating a downward spiral that leads to a continuous drain on public resources and exacerbating various city problems. In contrast, the cities that invest in the creation of human-centered, environmentally sustainable, economically vibrant, and socially inclusive places—in partnership with government entities, communities, and other private stakeholders—perform better. They implement smart and sustainable strategies across their public space asset life cycles to yield returns on investment far exceeding monetary costs, ultimately enhancing city livability, resilience, and competitiveness. The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces discusses the complexities that surround the creation and management of successful public spaces and draws on the analyses and experiences from city case studies from around the globe. This book identifies—through the lens of asset management—a rich palette of creative and innovative strategies that every city can undertake to plan, finance, and manage both government-owned and privately owned public spaces.

Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility

Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility PDF Author: van Melik, Rianne
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529219000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19, both those resulting from official governmental regulations and from everyday practices of urban citizens. The contributors discuss how the virus made urban inequalities clearer, and redefined public spaces in the “new normal”.

Contesting Public Spaces

Contesting Public Spaces PDF Author: Ed Wall
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000596354
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

Equitable Public Space

Equitable Public Space PDF Author: Margot Chalmers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Community development, Urban
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description


The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People

The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People PDF Author: Janet Loebach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429012810
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 596

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People is a thorough and practical resource for all who wish to influence policy and design decisions in order to increase young people’s access to and use of public spaces, as well as their role in design and decision-making processes. The ability of youth to freely enjoy public spaces, and to develop a sense of belonging and attachment to these environments, is critical for their physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Young people represent a vital citizen group with legitimate rights to occupy and shape their public environments, yet they are often driven out of public places by adult users, restrictive bylaws, or hostile designs. It is also important that children and youth have the opportunity to genuinely participate in the planning of public spaces, and to have their needs considered in the design of the public realm. This book provides both evidence and tools to help effectively advocate for more youth-inclusive public environments, as well as integrate youth directly into both research and design processes related to the public realm. It is essential reading for researchers, design and planning professionals, community leaders, and youth advocates.

Cities for Life

Cities for Life PDF Author: Jason Corburn
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642831727
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.

Public Space Design and Social Cohesion

Public Space Design and Social Cohesion PDF Author: Patricia Aelbrecht
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429951043
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Book Description
Social cohesion is often perceived as being under threat from the increasing cultural and economic differences in contemporary cities and the increasing intensity of urban life. Public space, in its role as the main stage for social interactions between strangers, clearly plays a role in facilitating or limiting opportunities for social cohesion. But what exactly is social cohesion, how is it experienced in the public realm, and what role can the design of city spaces have in supporting or promoting it? There are significant knowledge gaps between the social sciences and design disciplines and between academia and practice, and thus a dispersed knowledge base that currently lacks nuanced insight into how urban design contributes to social integration or segregation. This book brings together scholarly knowledge at the intersection of public space design and social cohesion. It is based on original scholarly research and a depth of urban design practice, and analyses case studies from a variety of cities and cultures across the Global North and Global South. Its interdisciplinary, cross-cultural analysis will be of interest to academics, students, policymakers and practitioners engaged with a range of subject areas, including urban design, urban planning, architecture, landscape, cultural studies, human geography, social policy, sociology and anthropology. It will also have significant appeal to a wider non-academic readership, given its topical subject matter.

A Country of Cities

A Country of Cities PDF Author: Vishaan Chakrabarti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935202172
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
In A Country of Cities, author Vishaan Chakrabarti argues that well-designed cities are the key to solving America's great national challenges: environmental degradation, unsustainable consumption, economic stagnation, rising public health costs and decreased social mobility. If we develop them wisely in the future, our cities can be the force leading us into a new era of progressive and prosperous stewardship of our nation. In compelling chapters, Chakrabarti brings us a wealth of information about cities, suburbs and exurbs, looking at how they developed across the 50 states and their roles in prosperity and globalization, sustainability and resilience, and heath and joy. Counter to what you might think, American cities today are growing faster than their suburban counterparts for the first time since the 1920s. If we can intelligently increase the density of our cities as they grow and build the transit systems, schools, parks and other infrastructure to support them, Chakrabarti shows us how both job opportunities and an improved, sustainable environment are truly within our means. In this call for an urban America, he illustrates his argument with numerous infographics illustrating provocative statistics on issues as disparate as rising childhood obesity rates, ever-lengthening automobile commutes and government subsidies that favor highways over mass transit. The book closes with an eloquent manifesto that rallies us to build "a Country of Cities," to turn a country of highways, houses and hedges into a country of trains, towers and trees. Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect, scholar and founder of PAU. PAU designs architecture that builds the physical, cultural, and economic networks of cities, with an emphasis on beauty, function and user experience. PAU simultaneously advances strategic urbanism projects in the form of master planning, tactical project advice and advocacy.

Open Spaces

Open Spaces PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description


Equitable Improvements to Public Space in the Right-of-way

Equitable Improvements to Public Space in the Right-of-way PDF Author: Chase Killebrew
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
As one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, Seattle is quickly losing its potential public open space. The need to create more public space with its increasing population will only intensify. The benefits of green space and more generally public space to public healthy and overall community well-being are widely known. Cities have been trying to deal with the lack of access a percentage of their populations has to public open space, especially since that percentage tends to be made up of minority and low-income populations. One potential solution to the declining public open space lies within the public right-of-way (ROW). ROW is publicly owned and supports the movement of people, goods, and services. It can serve as a vital resource with potential to be repurposed into successful public space. In Seattle, the ROW makes up 27 percent of the total land, and a large portion is currently underused, in terms of the benefits it could provide to the public. This thesis examines three Seattle Department of Transportation ROW programs that seek to encourage public space within the ROW. These programs are significant assets yet there is a distinct lack of participation in them within minority and low-income areas of the city. Through a study of the relevant literature, precedents from other American cities, and a geospatial analysis, I provide recommendations for making these programs more equitable to foster more meaningful public space within Seattle’s ROW.