Author: Henrik Ernstson Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262039915 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing. Contributors Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker
Author: Onur İnal Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429770715 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
This book is an exploration of the environmental makings and contested historical trajectories of environmental change in Turkey. Despite the recent proliferation of studies on the political economy of environmental change and urban transformation, until now there has not been a sufficiently complete treatment of Turkey's troubled environments, which live on the edge both geographically (between Europe and Middle East) and politically (between democracy and totalitarianism). The contributors to Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey use the toolbox of environmental humanities to explore the main political, cultural and historical factors relating to the country’s socio-environmental problems. This leads not only to a better grounding of some of the historical and contemporary debates on the environment in Turkey, but also a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of framings around more-than-human interactions in the country in a time of authoritarian populism. This book will be of interest not only to students of Turkey from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines but also contribute to the larger debates on environmental change and developmentalism in the context of a global populist turn.
Author: Thomas Elmqvist Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108186963 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look at our urban environment, bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines: from sociology and political science to evolutionary biology, geography, economics and engineering. It includes the perspectives of often neglected voices: architects, journalists, artists and activists. The book provides a much needed cross-scale perspective, connecting challenges and solutions on a local scale with drivers and policy frameworks on a regional and global scale. The authors argue that to overcome the major challenges we are facing, we must embark on a large-scale reinvention of how we live together, grounded in inclusiveness and sustainability. This title is also available Open Access.
Author: Nikolina Bobic Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1040018041 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 874
Book Description
Architecture and the urban are connected to challenges around violence, security, race and ideology, spectacle and data. The first volume of this handbook extensively explored these oppressive roles. This second volume illustrates that escaping the corporatized and bureaucratized orders of power, techno-managerial and consumer-oriented capitalist economic models is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Herein lies the political role of architecture and urban space, including the ways through which they can be transformed and alternative political realities constituted. The volume explores the methods and spatial practices required to activate the political dimension and the possibility for alternative practices to operate in the existing oppressive systems while not being swallowed by these structures. Fostering new political consciousness is explored in terms of the following themes: Events and Dissidence; Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire; Climate and Ecology; Urban Commons and Social Participation; Marginalities and Postcolonialism. Volume II embraces engagement across disciplines and offers a wide range of projects and critical analyses across the so-called Global North and South. This multidisciplinary collection of 36 chapters provides the reader with an extensive resource of case studies and ways of thinking for architecture and urban space to become more emancipatory. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
Author: Colin McFarlane Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1839760540 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Sanitation is fundamental to urban public life and health. We need Sanitation for All. In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste in the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All. The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’, it uses the notion of ‘citylife’ to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.
Author: Michelle L. Cocks Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000215180 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
This book showcases the diversity of ways in which urban residents from varying cultural contexts view, interact, engage with and give meaning to urban nature, aiming to counterbalance the dominance of Western depictions and values of urban nature and design. Urban nature has up to now largely been defined, planned and managed in a way that is heavily dominated by Western understandings, values and appreciations, which has spread through colonialism and globalisation. As cities increasingly represent a diversity of cultures, and urban nature is being increasingly recognised as contributing to residents' wellbeing, belonging and overall quality of life, it is important to consider the numerous ways in which urban nature is understood and appreciated. This collection of case studies includes examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and reflects on the multi-dimensional aspects of engagements with urban nature through a biocultural diversity lens. The chapters cover several themes such as how engagements with nature contribute to a sense of wellbeing and belonging; the implications that diversity has on the provision, design and management of urban environments; and the threats inhibiting residents’ abilities to engage meaningfully with nature. The book challenges the dominant discourse, Western ideological understandings and meta-narratives of modernisation and unilineal urban transitions. A timely addition to the literature, Urban Nature: Enriching Belonging, Wellbeing and Bioculture offers an alternative to Western ideological understandings of nature and values and will be of great interest to those working in human and environmental urban ecology. It will also be key reading for students in the relevant fields of anthropology, development studies, geography, social ecology and urban studies.
Author: Robert C. Brears Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030877450 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 2334
Book Description
While urban settlements are the drivers of the global economy and centres of learning, culture, and innovation and nations rely on competitive dynamic regions for their economic, social, and environmental objectives, urban centres and regions face a myriad of challenges that impact the ways in which people live and work, create wealth, and interact and connect with places. Rapid urbanisation is resulting in urban sprawl, rising emissions, urban poverty and high unemployment rates, housing affordability issues, lack of urban investment, low urban financial and governance capacities, rising inequality and urban crimes, environmental degradation, increasing vulnerability to natural disasters and so forth. At the regional level, low employment, low wage growth, scarce financial resources, climate change, waste and pollution, and rising urban peri-urban competition etc. are impacting the ability of regions to meet socio-economic development goals while protecting biodiversity. The response to these challenges has typically been the application of inadequate or piecemeal solutions, often as a result of fragmented decision-making and competing priorities, with numerous economic, environmental, and social consequences. In response, there is a growing movement towards viewing cities and regions as complex and sociotechnical in nature with people and communities interacting with one another and with objects, such as roads, buildings, transport links etc., within a range of urban and regional settings or contexts. This comprehensive MRW will provide readers with expert interdisciplinary knowledge on how urban centres and regions in locations of varying climates, lifestyles, income levels, and stages development are creating synergies and reducing trade-offs in the development of resilient, resource-efficient, environmentally friendly, liveable, socially equitable, integrated, and technology-enabled centres and regions.
Author: Kian Goh Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262371073 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
Contributions by urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, architects, and landscape architects on the role and scope of urban design in creating more just and inclusive cities. Scholars who write about justice and the city rarely consider the practices and processes of urban design, while discourses on urban design often neglect concerns about justice. The editors of Just Urban Design take the position that urban design interventions have direct and important implications for justice in the city. The contributions in this volume contextualize the state of knowledge about urban design for justice, stress inclusivity as the key to justice in the city, affirm community participation and organizing as cornerstones of greater equity, and assert that a just urban design must center and privilege our most marginalized individuals and communities. Approaching spatial and social justice in the city through the lens of urban design, the contributors explore the possibility of envisioning and delivering social, spatial, and environmental justice in cities through urban design and the material reality of built environment interventions. The editors’ combined expertise includes urban politics and climate change, public space, mobility justice, community development, housing, and informality, and the contributors include researchers and practitioners from urban planning, sociology, anthropology, architecture, and landscape architecture. Contributors: Rachel Berney, Rebecca Choi, Teddy Cruz, Diane E. Davis, Fonna Forman, Christopher Giamarino, Kian Goh, Alison B. Hirsch, Jeffrey Hou, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Setha Low, Matthew Jordan Miller, Vinit Mukhija, Chelina Odbert, Francesca Piazzoni, and Michael Rios.
Author: Henrik Ernstson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351809938 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 411
Book Description
Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new political possibilities that are opening up in an age marked by proliferating contestations, sharpening socio-ecological inequalities, and planetary processes of urbanization and environmental change. A deepened conversation between urban environmental studies and political theory is mobilized to chart a radically new direction for the field of urban political ecology and cognate disciplines: What could emancipatory politics be about in our time? What does a return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom signal today in theory and in practice? How do political movements emerge that could re-invent equality and freedom as actually existing socio-ecological practices? The hope is to contribute discussions that can expand and rearrange critical environmental studies to remain relevant in a time of deepening depoliticization and the rise of post-truth politics. Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene will be of interest to postgraduates, established scholars, and upper level undergraduates from any discipline or field with an interest in the interface between the urban, the environment, and the political, including: geography, urban studies, environmental studies, and political science.
Author: Henrik Ernstson
Author: Onur İnal
Author: Alex Loftus
Author: Thomas Elmqvist
Author: Nikolina Bobic
Author: Colin McFarlane
Author: Michelle L. Cocks
Author: Robert C. Brears
Author: Kian Goh
Author: Henrik Ernstson