Pragmatic Justifications For The Sustainable City

What can justice and sustainability mean, pragmatically speaking, in today’s cities? Can justice be the basis on which the practices of city building rely? Can this recognition constitute sustainability in city building, from a pragmatic perspective? Today, we are faced with a mountain of reasons to lose hope in any prospect of moving closer to justice and sustainability from our present position in civilization. Pragmatic Justifications for the Sustainable City: Acting in the Common Place offers a critical and philosophical approach to revaluating the way in which we think and talk about the "sustainable city" to ensure that we neither lose the thread of our urban history, nor the means to live well amidst diversity of all kinds. By building and rebuilding better habits of urban thinking, this book promotes the reconstruction of moral thinking, paving the way for a new urban sustainability model of justice. Utilizing multidisciplinary case studies and building upon anti-foundationalist principles, this book offers a pragmatic interpretation of sustainable development concepts within our emerging global urban context and will be a valuable resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics and professionals in the areas of urban and planning policy, sociology, and urban and environmental geography.

This ground breaking volume raises radical critiques and proposes innovative solutions for social sustainability in the built environment. Urban Social Sustainability provides an in-depth insight into the discourse and argues that every urban intervention has a social sustainability dimension that needs to be taken into consideration, and incorporated into a comprehensive and cohesive ‘urban agenda’ that is built on three principles of recognition, integration, and monitoring. This should be achieved through a dialogical and reflexive process of decision-making. To achieve sustainable communities, social sustainability should form the basis of a constructive dialogue and be interlinked with other areas of sustainable development. This book underlines the urgency of approaching social sustainability as an urban agenda and goes on to make suggestions about its formulation. Urban Social Sustainability consists of original contributions from academics and experts within the field and explores the significance of social sustainability from different perspectives. Areas covered include urban policy, transportation and mobility, urban space and architectural form, housing, urban heritage, neighbourhood development, and urban governance. Drawing on case studies from a number of countries and world regions the book presents a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding from social sustainability in urban settings, and provides practitioners and policy makers with innovative recommendations to achieve more socially sustainable urban environment.

While global urban development increasingly takes on the mantle of sustainability and "green urbanism," both the ecological and equity impacts of these developments are often overlooked. One result is what has been called environmental gentrification, a process in which environmental improvements lead to increased property values and the displacement of long-term residents. The specter of environmental gentrification is now at the forefront of urban debates about how to accomplish environmental improvements without massive displacement. In this context, the editors of this volume identified a strategy called "just green enough" based on field work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. A "just green enough" strategy focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals as defined by local communities, those people who have been most negatively affected by environmental disamenities, with the goal of keeping them in place to enjoy any environmental improvements. It is not about short-changing communities, but about challenging the veneer of green that accompanies many projects with questionable ecological and social justice impacts, and looking for alternative, sometimes surprising, forms of greening such as creating green spaces and ecological regeneration within protected industrial zones. Just Green Enough is a theoretically rigorous, practical, global, and accessible volume exploring, through varied case studies, the complexities of environmental improvement in an era of gentrification as global urban policy. It is ideal for use as a textbook at both undergraduate and graduate levels in urban planning, urban studies, urban geography, and sustainability programs.

The most successful urban communities are very often those that are the most diverse – in terms of income, age, family structure and ethnicity – and yet poor urban design and planning can stifle the very diversity that makes communities successful. Just as poor urban design can lead to sterile monoculture, successful planning can support the conditions needed for diverse communities. This new edition addresses the physical requirements of socially diverse neighborhoods. Using the city of Chicago and its surrounding suburban areas as a case study, the authors investigate whether social diversity is related to particular patterns and structures found within the urban built environment. Design for Social Diversity provides urban designers and architects with design strategies and tools to ensure that their work sustains and nurtures social diversity.

We face two global threats: the climate crisis and a crisis of democracy. Located at the crux of these crises, sustainable cities build on the foundations and resources of democracy to make our increasingly urban world more resilient and just. Sustainable Cities in American Democracy focuses on this effort as it emerged and developed over the past decades in the institutional field of sustainable cities—a vital response to environmental degradation and climate change that is shaped by civic and democratic action. Carmen Sirianni shows how various kinds of civic associations and grassroots mobilizing figure in this story, especially as they began to explicitly link conservation to the future of our democracy and then develop sustainable cities as a democratic project. These organizations are national, local, or multitiered, from the League of Women Voters to the Natural Resources Defense Council to bicycle and watershed associations. Some challenge city government agencies contentiously, while others seek collaboration; many do both at some point. Sirianni uses a range of analytic approaches—from scholarly disciplines, policy design, urban governance, social movements, democratic theory, public administration, and planning—to understand how such diverse civic and professional associations have come to be both an ecology of organizations and a systemic and coherent project. The institutional field of sustainable cities has emerged with some core democratic norms and civic practices but also with many tensions and trade-offs that must be crafted and revised strategically in the face of new opportunities and persistent shortfalls. Sirianni’s account draws ambitious yet pragmatic and hopeful lessons for a “Civic Green New Deal”—a policy design for building sustainable and resilient cities on much more robust foundations in the decades ahead while also addressing democratic deficits in our polarized political culture.

This thought-provoking Handbook provides a theoretical overview of the wide variety of anti-environmentalisms and offers an integrative research agenda for future research on the topic. Probing the ways in which groups have organized to oppose environmental movements and pro-environmental policies in recent decades, it examines those involved in these countermovements and studies their motivations and support systems. This Handbook explores core topics in the field, including contestation over climate change, wind power, mining, forestry, food sovereignty, oil and gas pipelines and population issues.

In the years since the new mobilities paradigm burst onto the social scientific scene, scholars from various disciplines have analyzed the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of transport, contesting its long-dominant understandings as defined by engineering and economics. Still, the vast majority of mobility studies, and even key works that mention the “good life” and its dependence on the car, fail to consider mobilities in connection with moral theories of the common good. In Assembling Moral Mobilities Nicholas A. Scott presents novel ways of understanding how cycling and driving animate urban space, place, and society and investigates how cycling can learn from the ways in which driving has become invested with moral value. By jointly analyzing how driving and cycling reassembled the “good city” between 1901 and 2017, with a focus on various cities in Canada, in Detroit, and in Oulu, Finland, Scott confronts the popular notion that cycling and driving are merely antagonistic systems and challenges social-scientific research that elides morality and the common good. Instead of pitting bikes against cars, Assembling Moral Mobilities looks at five moral values based on canonical political philosophies of the common good, and argues that both cycling and driving figure into larger, more important “moral assemblages of mobility,” finally concluding that the deeper meta-lesson that proponents of cycling ought to take from driving is to focus on ecological responsibility, equality, and home at the expense of neoliberal capitalism. Scott offers a fresh perspective of mobilities and the city through a multifaceted investigation of cycling informed by historical lessons of automobility.

Housing affordability, urban development and climate change responses are great challenges that are intertwined, yet the conceptual and policy links between them remain under-developed. Housing Sustainability in Low Carbon Cities addresses this gap by developing an interdisciplinary approach to urban decarbonisation, drawing upon more established, yet quite distinctive, fields of built environment policy and design, housing, and studies of social and economic change. Through this approach, policy and practices of housing affordability, equity, energy efficiency, resilience and renewables are critiqued and alternatives are presented. Drawing upon international case studies, this book provides a unique contribution to interdisciplinary urban and housing studies, discourses and practices in an era of climate change. This book is recommended reading on higher level undergraduate and taught postgraduate courses in architecture, urban studies, planning, built environment, geography and urban studies. It will also be directly valuable to housing and urban policy makers and sustainability practitioners.