Urban Planning For Transitions

Today, as cities undergo rapid and dynamic transformations, riddled with uncertainties about the future, the roles of urban planning and urban planners lie in one of these new crossroad moments. Climate change, urban migration, social inclusion, health emergencies and financial and economic crises have elevated urbanization to newer heights of complexity that can only be tackled by integrating a multitude of scenarios, strategies and discourses, in order to create an urban future that is resilient and sustainable. Urban planners have come up with transition proposals and concepts that they hope will be able to respond to cities challenges and ultimately allow them to adapt and make the transition into more robust urban areas. This book presents and discusses various urban transition strategies, action plans and programs that have been proposed or even conducted in different countries all over the world. Different countries require different strategies, but they all have the same goal in mind, each of them trying to address urban complexities and cope with the rapid pace at which the world is evolving.

The world’s population is currently undergoing a significant transition towards urbanisation, with the UN expecting that 70% of people globally will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation has multiple political, cultural, environmental and economic dimensions that profoundly influence social development and innovation. This fundamental long-term transformation will involve the realignment of urban society’s technologies and infrastructures, culture and lifestyles, as well as governance and institutional frameworks. Such structural systemic realignments can be referred to as urban sustainability transitions: fundamental and structural changes in urban systems through which persistent societal challenges are addressed, such as shifts towards urban farming, renewable decentralised energy systems, and social economies. This book provides new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in different types of cities across the world and explores possible strategies for governing urban transitions, emphasising the co-evolution of material and institutional transformations in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. With case studies of mega-cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Adelaide, medium-sized cities such as Copenhagen, Cape Town and Portland, and nonmetropolitan cities such as Freiburg, Ghent and Brighton, the book provides an opportunity to reflect upon the comparability and transferability of theoretical/conceptual constructs and governance approaches across geographical contexts. Urban Sustainability Transitions is key reading for students and scholars working in Environmental Sciences, Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Policy and Planning.

This open access book is focused on the intersection between urban brownfields and the sustainability transitions of metreopolitan areas, cities and neighbourhoods. It provides both a theoretical and practical approach to the topic, offering a thorough introduction to urban brownfields and regeneration projects as well as an operational monitoring tool. Neighbourhoods in Transition begins with an overview of historic urban development and strategic areas in the hearts of towns to be developed. It then defines several key issues related to the topic, including urban brownfields, regeneration projects, and sustainability issues related to neighbourhood development. The second part of this book is focused on support tools, explaining the challenges faced, the steps involved in a regeneration process, and offering an operational monitoring tool. It applies the unique tool to case studies in three selected neighbourhoods and the outcomes of one case study are also presented and discussed, highlighting its benefits. The audience for this book will be both professional and academic. It will support researchers as an up-to-date reference book on urban brownfield regeneration projects, and also the work of architects, urban designers, urban planners and engineers involved in sustainability transitions of the built environment.

This is a unique book that provides rich knowledge on how to understand and actively contribute to urban sustainability transitions. The book combines theoretical frameworks and tools with practical experiences on transition management as a framework that supports urban planning and governance towards sustainability. The book offers the opportunity to become actively engaged in working towards sustainable futures of cities. Readers of this book will be equipped to understand the complexity of urban sustainability transitions and diagnose persistent unsustainability problems in cities. Urban planners and professionals will build competences for designing transition management processes in cities and engaging with multidisciplinary knowledge in solution-seeking processes. The heart of the book marks the variety of very different local case studies across the world – including, amongst others, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, La Botija in Honduras, Sydney in Australia and Cleveland in the US. These rich studies give inspiration and practical insights to young planners on how to create sustainable urban futures in collaboration with other stakeholders. The case studies and critical reflections on applications of transition management in cities offer food for thought and welcome criticism. They also introduce new lenses to understand the bigger picture that co-creation dynamics play in terms of power, (dis-)empowerment, legitimacy and changing actor roles. This will equip the readers with a deep understanding of the dynamics, opportunities and challenges present in urban contexts and urban sustainability transitions.

Rethinking Urban Transitions provides critical insight for societal and policy debates about the potential and limits of low carbon urbanism. It draws on over a decade of international research, undertaken by scholars across multiple disciplines concerned with analysing and shaping urban sustainability transitions. It seeks to open up the possibility of a new generation of urban low carbon transition research, which foregrounds the importance of political, geographical and developmental context in shaping the possibilities for a low carbon urban future. The book’s contributions propose an interpretation of urban low carbon transitions as primarily social, political and developmental processes. Rather than being primarily technical efforts aimed at measuring and mitigating greenhouse gases, the low carbon transition requires a shift in the mode and politics of urban development. The book argues that moving towards this model requires rethinking what it means to design, practise and mobilize low carbon in the city, while also acknowledging the presence of multiple and contested developmental pathways. Key to this shift is thinking about transitions, not solely as technical, infrastructural or systemic shifts, but also as a way of thinking about collective futures, societal development and governing modes – a recognition of the political and contested nature of low carbon urbanism. The various contributions provide novel conceptual frameworks as well as empirically rich cases through which we can begin to interrogate the relevance of socio-economic, political and developmental dimensions in the making or unmaking of low carbon in the city. The book draws on a diverse range of examples (including ‘world cities’ and ‘ordinary cities’) from North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa, India and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are both emerging and encountering resistance in different urban contexts. Rethinking Urban Transitions is an essential text for courses concerned with cities, climate change and environmental issues in sociology, politics, urban studies, planning, environmental studies, geography and the built environment.

Today, as cities undergo rapid and dynamic transformations, riddled with uncertainties about the future, the roles of urban planning and urban planners lie in one of these new crossroad moments. Climate change, urban migration, social inclusion, health emergencies and financial and economic crises have elevated urbanization to newer heights of complexity that can only be tackled by integrating a multitude of scenarios, strategies and discourses, in order to create an urban future that is resilient and sustainable. Urban planners have come up with transition proposals and concepts that they hope will be able to respond to cities challenges and ultimately allow them to adapt and make the transition into more robust urban areas. This book presents and discusses various urban transition strategies, action plans and programs that have been proposed or even conducted in different countries all over the world. Different countries require different strategies, but they all have the same goal in mind, each of them trying to address urban complexities and cope with the rapid pace at which the world is evolving.