Planning Small And Mid Sized Towns

Small and mid-sized suburban towns house two-thirds of the world’s population and current modes of planning for these municipalities are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Common approaches that have prevailed in past decades no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. Rather than dismissing small and mid-sized towns as unattractive suburban sprawl, Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns offers ideas and methods on how small isolated and edge towns can be designed and retooled into sustainable, affordable and adaptable communities. Coverage includes: the evolution of small towns mobility and connectivity neighborhood and sustainable dwelling design town centers and urban renewal economic sustainability and wealth generation, and more. With numerous case studies from North America and Europe and over 150 color photographs, maps, and illustrations, Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns is a valuable, practical resource for professional planners and urban designers, as well as students in these disciplines.

Small and mid-sized suburban towns house two-thirds of the world’s population and current modes of planning for these municipalities are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Common approaches that have prevailed in past decades no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. Rather than dismissing small and mid-sized towns as unattractive suburban sprawl, Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns offers ideas and methods on how small isolated and edge towns can be designed and retooled into sustainable, affordable and adaptable communities. Coverage includes: the evolution of small towns mobility and connectivity neighborhood and sustainable dwelling design town centers and urban renewal economic sustainability and wealth generation, and more. With numerous case studies from North America and Europe and over 150 color photographs, maps, and illustrations, Planning Small and Mid-Sized Towns is a valuable, practical resource for professional planners and urban designers, as well as students in these disciplines.

The book introduces challenges affecting smaller urban communities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants and offers urban planning and building/architectural strategies to strengthen their city centers. It divides urban renewal of small towns into sub-components such as environmental challenges, demographic trends, economic changes and cultural aspects, and aging infrastructure. In each, context is established, and principles are outlined and illustrated. Topics include urban form, mobility and connectivity, infill neighborhoods design, wealth generation, and promotion of local culture and well‐being. Reinforced with detailed case studies, Fundamentals of Sustainable Urban Renewal in Small and Mid‐Sized Towns is an ideal resource for municipal planners, architects, civil engineers, and policy makers.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Exploring current debates on the topic, this book maps out an agenda for theory, research and practice about the role and function of small and medium-sized towns in various contexts and at different territorial scales. Chapters highlight new insights and approaches to studying small and medium-sized towns, moving beyond the ‘urban bias’ to provide nuanced thought on these spaces both in terms of their relation to larger cities, and in terms of implications related to their size.

Much recent research in Urban Studies has concentrated on the notion of the ‘global city’ but discussion has also covered a larger set of mega cities, with populations in excess of 10 million. This analysis has begged the question of the optimal size for a city – is larger always better? Smaller Cities explores the advantages and disadvantages of different sized cities, trying to determine their place in the global economy and hierarchy. How can smaller cities gain or retain their competitiveness in a world of large cities? In a globalized world, the nation has perhaps been diminished as an economic actor, with fiscal shortcomings and political gridlock leaving cities more or less on their own in the task of enhancing their competitiveness and improving the economic lives of their residents. This book argues that smaller cities of varying population can be important actors in competitiveness and aims to bring attention to an area often overlooked by researchers. In short, are Pittsburgh, San Diego and Austin less competitive than London and Mumbai? This volume will be of interest to students, researchers, and city professionals who work in urban economy and urban geography.

This book begins with an introduction describing current societal transformations that merit new urban designs, including depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions, large numbers of aging “Baby Boomers,” and climate change. Dr. Friedman then examines these challenges through thirty chapters of interest to urban designers, architects, civil and construction engineers, and town planners. Each of these topics represents an aspect of urban design and describes an innovative solution and offers a detailed description of underlying principles. The highly illustrated text presents innovative urban design strategies based on sustainable principles. Integrated with each chapter are several international case studies illustrating design implementations.

This edited volume examines how climate action plans engage justice at the scale of the city. Recent events in the United States make the context particularly ripe for a discussion of justice in urban climate politics. On the one hand, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd’s death, and the prominence of racial discrimination in the public realm have mainstreamed the notion of justice. On the other hand, the dire consequences of increased frequency and severity of climate events on vulnerable segments of urban populations are undeniable. While some cities have been proactive about integrating justice in their climate action planning, in most places an explicit and systematic link between both spheres has been lacking. This book explores this interface as it seeks to understand how cities can respond to climate change in a just way and for just outcomes. While resilience strategies based on “development” may engage historic inequities, they may at the same time result in marginalizing certain populations through various processes, from mismatched solutions to outright exclusion and climate gentrification. By identifying how certain populations are included in or excluded from climate action planning practices, the chapters in this volume draw on case studies to outline the differential outcomes of climate action in American cities, also proposing a template for comparative work beyond the US. The authors tackle the debate about how justice is or is not integrated in climate action plans and assess practical implications, while also making theoretical and methodological contributions. As it fills a gap in the literature at the intersection of justice and climate action, the book produces new insights for a wide-ranging audience: students, practitioners, policy-makers, planners, the non-profit sector, and scholars in geography, urban planning, urban studies, environmental studies, ecology, political science, or anthropology. Along five axes of investigation―theory, resilience, equity, community, and comparison as method―the contributors offer various pathways into the intersection between urban climate action and different understandings of justice. Collectively, they invite a reflection that can lead to practical initiatives in climate mitigation, while also advancing the theorization of social justice to account for the urban as a node where (in)justice plays out and can be addressed with significant results.

A pioneering book highlighting the dynamic environmental dimensions of towns and villages and spatial connections with surrounding land.