Innovative Solutions For Creating Sustainable Cities

How do we prepare for and manage the challenges and the transformations that are increasingly confronting cities? Solutions are necessary for the impacts expected from the global population movement toward urban centres; the evolution of technologies and its influence on the economy; the evolving socio-cultural fabric of our cities and what it means for citizen engagement and happiness; and for the increasing need to protect and better manage the environment. The series of essays presented here will help governments, organizations, and concerned citizens think differently about ways we can improve the places we call home. It will stimulate local stakeholders to move away from silo-thinking and work collaboratively toward innovative solutions to make cities more liveable and sustainable. The volume brings together international experts on development, innovation, education, health, digitalization, and planning to provide stimulating new ideas and successful examples of tools and systems being used worldwide to improve the future of cities.

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. Two trends come together in the world’s cities to make urban sustainability a critical issue today. First, greater and greater numbers of people are living in urban areas—and are projected to do so for the foreseeable future. Additionally, cities contribute to climate change in a significant way and must make systemic changes to mitigate and adapt to climate change effects. Urban planners face serious challenges in enhancing sustainability but also have an important set of tools available for creating innovative solutions. This book adds to the conversation about the place of urban planning in the creation and maintenance of sustainable cities.

This book describes a broad view of sustainability as a crucial factor for the success of its implementation. Not only the environmental aspects of the sustainable cities ́ development are reviewed but the economic and social aspects of it, as highlighted in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 (make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable). Nowadays, researchers, students, and stakeholders are highly involved in sustainability issues. Because of this, they need a guiding document to help them develop and implement sustainability programs at the level of companies and institutions. In this book, the authors discuss and explain basic concepts of sustainability-related to social, economic and environmental aspects, as well as strategies for its implementation.

Cities around the world are becoming increasingly popular as economic powerhouses and magnets for migrants from rural and suburban areas. All big cities in First and Third World countries as well as emerging markets such as New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Dehli, Jakarta etc. have to cope with high population density and serious challenges such as air pollution or traffic congestion. How do we pack more people into big cities and yet continue to realise a high quality of life? How do we plan, create and manage 'good cities' which are safe, spacious, green, connected, fair and resilient? How can cities create economic wealth while still fulfilling the vision of sustaining our "Green Planet"? What are best practice designs and innovative technical smart city solutions which could be leveraged to tackle these challenges and how can they be successfully commercialised? These are some of the questions the reader addresses from a multi-disciplinary perspective with special reference to Singapore whose development from regional entrepôt to First World Metropolis continues to impress business and societal leaders around the world. The book's contents are broadly structured according to the following aspects: (i) definition and taxonomy of innovative & sustainable cities, including its core characteristics and how they create value in terms of innovativeness and sustainability; (ii) governance, planning and selected design principles of innovative & sustainable cities and how they pan out with regard to livability and sustainability; and (iii) in-depth study of selected smart city dimensions such as governance, clustering, connectivity, mobility, ageing, water, sports, and safety.

As the world becomes more urbanised, solutions are required to solve current challenges for three arenas of sustainability: social sustainability, environmental sustainability and urban economic sustainability. This edited volume interrogates innovative solutions for sustainability in cities around the world. The book draws on a group of 12 international case studies, including Vancouver and Calgary in Canada, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US (North America), Yogyakarta in Indonesia, Seoul in Korea (South-East Asia), Medellin in Colombia (South America), Helsinki in Finland, Freiburg in Germany and Seville in Spain (Europe). Each case study provides key facts about the city, presents the particular urban sustainability challenge and the planning innovation process and examines what trade-offs were made between social, environmental and economic sustainability. Importantly, the book analyses to what extent these planning innovations can be translated from one context to another. This book will be essential reading to students, academics and practitioners of urban planning, urban sustainability, urban geography, architecture, urban design, environmental sciences, urban studies and politics.

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.

Interest in the sustainable city is growing around the world and with it come important questions about governing sustainable urban development. Why are there blockages to achieving the goal of a sustainable city? How is it possible to overcome the practical difficulties that initiatives often face? And how can an increasingly technocratic focus be rebalanced with more of a public perspective? In this wide-ranging text, Simon Joss examines mainstream policy and practice and looks at the approaches that can overcome some of their drawbacks. The author examines the core elements of sustainable planning, and how processes of innovation, governance and policy-making work together to achieve sustainable urban change. He assesses the various challenges faced at both the domestic and international level, and across a range of urban scales. These challenges include how to resolve environmentally problematic ways of city-living at the same time as providing for urban social and economic development, and how to adapt the idea and reality of the sustainable city to different geopolitical contexts. The author recognizes that there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution and examines the range of methods available. In an era where entirely new eco-cities are being built and established ones being retro-fitted in response to environmental pressures, this text looks at the varying successes of the urban sustainability movement and its relationship to the planners, policy-makers and citizens who are inseparable from it. Providing an accessible account of the latest developments in research and policy as well as examples from around the world, this is indispensable reading for students, researchers and practitioners alike.

A powerful tool for leveraging change toward sustainability.