Revitalizing Urban Waterway Communities

The revitalizing and restoration of rivers, creeks and streams is a major focus of urban conservation activity throughout North America and Europe. This book presents models and examples for organizing multiple stakeholders for purposes of waterway revitalization – if not restoration – within a context of fairness and environmental justice. After decades of neglect and misuse the complexity of cleaning up urban rivers and streams is shown to be complex and truly daunting. Urban river cleanup typically involve multiple agendas and stakeholders, as well as complicated technical issues. It is also often the situation that the most affected have the least voice in what happens. The authors present social process models for maximum inclusion of various stakeholders in decision-making for urban waterway regeneration. A range of examples is presented, drawn principally from North America and Europe.

Over half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Few who live in cities understand that cities, too, are ecosystems, as beholden to the laws and principles of ecology as are natural ecosystems. Understanding Urban Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach introduces students at the college undergraduate level, or those in advanced-standing college credit high school courses, to cities as ecosystems. For graduate students it provides an overview and rich literature base. Urban planners, educators, and decision makers can use this book to help in designing a more sustainable or “green” future. The authors use a systems approach to explore the complexity and interactions of different components of a city’s ecology with an emphasis on the energy and materials required to maintain such concentrated centers of human activity and consumption. The book is written by seventeen specialized contributors and includes ten accompanying detailed field exercises to promote hands-on experience, observation, and quantification of urban ecosystem structure and function.The chapters describe one by one the different subsystems of the urban environment, their individual components and functions, and the interactions among them that create the social-ecological environments in which we live. The book’s emphasis on social-ecological metabolism provides students with the knowledge and methods needed to evaluate proposed policies for urban sustainability in terms of ecosystem capacity, potential positive and negative feedbacks, the laws of thermo-dynamics, and socio-cultural perception and adaptability.

At a time of great turmoil and crisis, environmentally, socially and politically, water has emerged as a topic of huge global concern. Moreover, many argue that what is needed in order to change our relationship with the environment is a cultural paradigm shift. To this end, this volume brings together diverse approaches to exploring human relationships with the watery world and the other living things that rely upon it. Through exploring multiple creative ways of engaging with water and people, the volume adds to the current zeitgeist of writing about water by expanding the discussion about this vital substance and how, as humans, we relate to it. Chapters focus on creative explorations and explorations of creativity in relation to developing these understandings, including concepts such as hydrocitizenship and responses to drought and flooding. Drawing on the in-depth research and experience of arts practitioners including participatory artists, as well as academics from a variety of fields including geography, anthropology, health studies and environmental humanities, the book provides a rich and multidisciplinary perspective on water and creative ways of engaging and understanding human–water relationships. It represents a valuable source and inspiration for academics, arts practitioners and those involved in environmental policy and governance.

In line with COP21 agreements, state-led climate change mitigation and adaptation actions are being undertaken to transition to carbon-neutral, green economies. However, the capacity of many countries for action is limited and may result in a ‘boomerang effect’, defined as the unintended negative consequences of such policies and programmes on local communities and their negative feedbacks on the state. To avoid this effect, there is a need to understand the policy drivers, decision-making processes, and impacts of such action, in order to determine the ways and means of minimizing negative effects and maximizing mutually beneficial policy outcomes. This book directly engages the policy debates surrounding water resources and climate actions through both theoretical and comparative case studies. It develops the ‘boomerang effect’ concept and sets it in relation to other conceptual tools for understanding the mixed outcomes of state-led climate change action, for example ‘backdraft’ effect and ‘maldevelopment’. It also presents case studies illustrative of the consequences of ill-considered state-led policy in the water sector from around the world. These include Africa, China, South Asia, South America, the Middle East, Turkey and Vietnam, and examples of groundwater, hydropower development and forest hydrology, where there are often transboundary consequences of a state's policies and actions. In this way, the book adds empirical and theoretical insights to a still developing debate regarding the appropriate ways and means of combating climate change without undermining state and social development.

Just as space, territory and society can be socially and politically co-constructed, so can water, and thus the construction of hydraulic infrastructures can be mobilised by politicians to consolidate their grip on power while nurturing their own vision of what the nation is or should become. This book delves into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement and the nation-state, addressing two major questions. First, the arguments deployed consider how water as a resource can be ideologically constructed, imagined and framed to create and reinforce a national identity, and secondly, how the idea of a nation-state can and is materially co-constituted out of the material infrastructure through which water is harnessed and channelled. The book consists of 13 theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary chapters covering four continents. The case studies cover a diverse range of geographical areas and countries, including China, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Nepal and Thailand, and together illustrate that the meaning and rationale behind water infrastructures goes well beyond the control and regulation of water resources, as it becomes central in the unfolding of power dynamics across time and space.