Sustainable Urban Landscapes

This book on urban design extends and develops the widely accepted 'compact city' solution. It provides a design proposal for a new kind of sustainable urban landscape: Urban Agriculture. By growing food within an urban rather than exclusively rural environment, urban agriculture would reduce the need for industrialized production, packaging and transportation of foodstuffs to the city dwelling consumers. The revolutionary and innovative concepts put forth in this book have potential to shape the future of our cities quality of life within them. Urban design is shown in practice through international case studies and the arguments presented are supported by quantified economic, environmental and social justifications.

This handbook addresses a growing list of challenges faced by regions and cities in the Pacific Rim, drawing connections around the what, why, and how questions that are fundamental to sustainable development policies and planning practices. These include the connection between cities and surrounding landscapes, across different boundaries and scales; the persistence of environmental and development inequities; and the growing impacts of global climate change, including how physical conditions and social implications are being anticipated and addressed. Building upon localized knowledge and contextualized experiences, this edited collection brings attention to place-based approaches across the Pacific Rim and makes an important contribution to the scholarly and practical understanding of sustainable urban development models that have mostly emerged out of the Western experiences. Nine sections, each grounded in research, dialogue, and collaboration with practical examples and analysis, focus on a theme or dimension that carries critical impacts on a holistic vision of city-landscape development, such as resilient communities, ecosystem services and biodiversity, energy, water, health, and planning and engagement. This international edited collection will appeal to academics and students engaged in research involving landscape architecture, architecture, planning, public policy, law, urban studies, geography, environmental science, and area studies. It also informs policy makers, professionals, and advocates of actionable knowledge and adoptable ideas by connecting those issues with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. The collection of writings presented in this book speaks to multiyear collaboration of scholars through the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes (SCL) Program and its global network, facilitated by SCL Annual Conferences and involving more than 100 contributors from more than 30 institutions. The Open Access version of chapters 1, 2, 4, 11, 17, 23, 30, 37, 42, 49, and 56 of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003033530, have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book is about how to make our new neighbourhoods more sustainable than they are now. By sustainable, we mean the maintenance of the ecological health of our neighbourhoods and the provision of equitable access to affordable housing for our children. We hope that this book will be of interest to everyone; from the public officials and private developers who participate in developing and managing the urban landscape today to the secondary-school students who will shoulder these responsibilities tomorrow. This book includes four different designs for the same 400-acre site in Surrey, British Columbia, each design having been produced by a team of architects and landscape architects, working 'en charrette.'

This volume introduces an innovative tool for the development of sustainable cities and the promotion of the quality of life of city inhabitants. It presents a decision-support system to orient public administrations in identifying development scenarios for sustainable urban and territorial transformations. The authors have split the volume into five parts, which respectively describe the theoretical basis of the book, the policies in question and indicators that influence them, the decision-support system that connects indicators to policies, the case study of Ancona, Italy, and potential future directions for this work. This volume is based on transdisciplinary research completed in May 2016 that involved about 40 researchers at The University of Camerino, Italy and other European universities. With purchase of this book, readers will also have access to Electronic Supplementary Material that contains a database with groups of indicators of assessment of urban quality of life and a toolkit containing the data processing system and management information system used in the book’s case study.

The growth of cities poses ever-increasing challenges for the natural environment on which they impact and depend, not only within their boundaries but also in surrounding peri-urban areas. Landscape ecology – the study of interactions across space and time between the structure and function of physical, biological and cultural components of landscapes – has a pivotal role to play in identifying sustainable solutions. This book brings together examples of research at the cutting edge of urban landscape ecology across multiple contexts that investigate the state, maintenance and restoration of healthy and functional natural environments across urban and peri-urban landscapes. An explicit focus is on urban landscapes in contrast to other books which have considered urban ecosystems and ecology without specific focus on spatial connections. It integrates research and perspectives from across academia, public and private practitioners of urban conservation, planning and design. It provides a much needed summary of current thinking on how urban landscapes can provide the foundation of sustained economic growth, prospering communities and personal well-being.

This book deals with planning issues in landscape architecture, which start at the evaluation of the existing fabric of society, its history and memory, approached and conserved through photography, film and scenographic installations, a way in which the archetypes can be investigated, be it industrial derelict sites or already green spaces and cultural landscapes. It provides approaches to intervention, through rehabilitation and upgrade, eventually in participative manner. To such evaluation and promotion a couple of disciplines can contribute such as history of art, geography and communication science and of course (landscape) architecture. The field of landscape architecture reunites points of view from such different disciplines with a view to an active approach a contemporary intervention or conservation. The book presents case studies from several European countries (Romania, Germany, Austria, Italy, Portugal) mostly for large landscape in the outskirts of the cities and in the parks.