Reshaping Winter Cities

Collection of papers by Canadian experts concerning development policies, strategies, concepts and trends that will ameliorate important features of daily life in cities, with special emphasis on the winter season. Highlights critical issues related to cold climate urban environments.

What does the future hold for winter cities? Will the migration of people and jobs to the sunbelt prove to be an irreversible trend? This volume assesses the prospects of snowbelt cities. The contributors suggest that the future of older cities in winter climates will be influenced by: the revitalization of older industrial cities; the annexation in the growth of southern cities; the concept of 'liveable winter cities'; the evolution of transactional cities as a significant sector of the economy; and new design initiatives such as multibuilding, multiblock pedestrian walkways, and mass production of glass at a low cost.

The authors offer a perspective of how to integrate public space and public life. They contend that three critical human dimensions should guide the process of design and management of public space: the users' essential needs, their spatial rights, and the meanings they seek.

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic is a concise introductory guide to the design and planning of the built environments in the Arctic region. As the global forces of change are becoming more pronounced in the Arctic, the future trajectories for living environments, city-making processes, and their adaptive capacities need to be addressed directly. This book presents 11 new and original contributions from both leading and emerging scholars and practitioners, positioning the Arctic as a dynamic, diverse, and lived place at the nexus of unprecedented socioenvironmental transformations. The volume offers key concepts for understanding and spatializing Arctic cities and landscapes; similarities and differences in the development of design and planning approaches responsive to specific climatic and cultural conditions; and historical and geographic case studies that provide unique perspectives for the management of the built environment, from the scales of a building and infrastructure to cities and territories. Altogether, the contributions expand regional Arctic design scholarship to understand how the variability of the Arctic context influences the designed urban, architecture, and landscape systems, and offer numerous lessons for design and other forms of spatial practice both within and beyond the Arctic. This is a unique resource for researchers, creative practitioners, policymakers, and community decision-makers, as well as for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

Hough argues that the monotony of the modern landscape is a reflection of society's indifference to the diversity inherent in ecological systems and in human communities. He uses world-wide case studies to show how built areas work and how designers can maintain the identities of different places.

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, this book illustrates the immense complexities of Svalbard as a place, point of reference, or social concept. It portrays the multiple, situated perspectives that characterize understandings and imaginings of Svalbard, and brings together contributions from academic fields that rarely interact with each other. Svalbard Imaginaries contributes to a number of research contexts, ranging from a broadly conceived, multi-disciplinary field of ‘Arctic Studies’ to more disciplinary specific debates on how places are reworked at the interstices of various global flows and vice versa. It assembles contributions on imaginaries that cover a wide array of issues, including—but not limited to—Svalbard as a geopolitical site, a landscape, an image, a (mining) heritage assemblage, a tourist destination, a wilderness, a built environment, a site of knowledge production, a site of artistic engagement, and projections of the future. It deliberately assembles analyses that refer to a variety of timescales and covers representations of the past, the present, and possible futures of Svalbard.