Sustainable Communities And Urban Housing

Since the start of the twenty-first century, urban communities have faced increasing challenges in housing affordability, with environmental issues causing additional concern. It is clear that changes to urban housing are needed to enhance the resilience of cities and improve the economic, social and physical well-being of residents. This book provides a comparative cross-national perspective on urban housing and sustainability in Europe, exploring the key barriers and drivers associated with sustainable urban development and community regeneration. Country-specific chapters allow for easy comparison, with each summarizing how sustainable housing operates in the country in question, before going on to discuss the key barriers and drivers at play. This book brings a sustainability perspective to the comparative housing literature which frequently fails to integrate the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. The book outlines many of the changes that professionals and residents will need to make to their practices and cultures in order to enhance housing resilience. Students, researchers and professionals with an interest in sustainable housing creation and regeneration will find this book an invaluable reference.

Questions of how the design of cities can respond to the challenge of climate change dominate the thoughts of urban planners and designers across the U.S. and Canada. With admirable clarity, Patrick Condon responds to these questions. He addresses transportation, housing equity, job distribution, economic development, and ecological systems issues and synthesizes his knowledge and research into a simple-to-understand set of urban design recommendations. No other book so clearly connects the form of our cities to their ecological, economic, and social consequences. No other book takes on this breadth of complex and contentious issues and distills them down to such convincing and practical solutions.

This groundbreaking new volume on social sustainability offers both critique and creative solutions. It challenges the conventional wisdoms of social sustainability and presents practical examples of projects that will help practitioners to think carefully and innovatively about the situations they are addressing. The book consists of original contributions from academics working in the fields of urban planning, housing, regeneration, transport and international sustainable development. Drawing on case study research gathered in the UK, Europe and Africa, it adopts an original, interdisciplinary approach to both theory and practice, illustrating the challenges and opportunities facing policy-makers and practitioners attempting to develop, manage and maintain sustainable communities. The authors argue that the dominant approach of 'how to do' small scale social sustainability fails to locate it within broader social processes. Ignoring the context not only sustains, but also actively reproduces wider inequalities. The book presents a new, more coherent and more complete approach to issues of social sustainability in urban areas. The book approaches current urban policy discourses in three different ways, represented by three sections: firstly focusing on small places within the urban fabric, secondly addressing the whole urban fabric by examining whether changing urban living and working patterns. The third section explores some of the ways that funding can be secured to achieve the aims of social sustainability and the social planning associated with it.

Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Sociology - Habitation, Urban Sociology, grade: 2.0, University of Westminster, language: English, abstract: In the last decade sustainability has become a central topic in discussions of regeneration in the UK and most other places in the world. Heightening awareness of current issues and that of future generations' is crucial in making a difference. The concept of sustainability can be applied to most aspects of human living and working. Within this essay co-housing as a form of sustainable communities will be discovered and introduced through a new built development in Gloucestershire, UK. This document seeks to approach this topic from various angles and aims to show weaknesses and strengths of co-housing. It should be highlighted that it is not only new developments where proactive differences need to be made but also within existing developments and houses. I will show that changes and improvements can be made through small or medium interventions.

The world's population is rapidly urbanizing but the affluence and development often associated with cities are far from equitably or sustainably distributed. Where it was once taken for granted that responsibility for urban development lay with the state, increasingly the emphasis has shifted to market-driven and public-private sector initiatives, which can marginalize the intended beneficiaries - the urban poor - from decision making and implementation. This text outlines the essential conditions for effective urban planning and management by placing bottom-up community initiatives at the heart of the push for equitable and sustainable development in cities. Crucially, the state must engage with both the market and civil society in pursuit of sustainable cities. Presenting a wide-ranging selection of case studies in rapidly urbanizing and transitional countries, from the poorest parts of Africa and Asia to the relatively developed United Kingdom, the authors describe and analyze innovations in how globally disadvantaged urban communities can be engaged in improving their living environments.

Ireland is now an urban society, and both parts of the island have experienced rapid urban-generated growth and new patterns of development in recent years. This inter-disciplinary book adopts an all-Ireland perspective to investigate the tension that exists between sustainable urban development values and rhetoric - such as increased densities, brown field development, the compact city and social inclusion - and the emerging geography of urban Ireland, influenced by consumer and lifestyle choices. The introduction provides an overview of the dynamics of urban change, particularly during the 1990s, and the experience of rapid economic growth. The following chapters are divided into two parts, considering sustainable urban environments, and sustainable communities. This book will appeal to students, academics, policy and decision-makers, given that it adopts both a qualitative and quantitative approach, and introduces a range of new empirical studies covering both physical and social sustainable development.

An up-to-date assessment by prominent scholars of the impacts of recent changes on key areas of urban planning, including housing, transport, and the environment, and core areas for future research.