Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions


Book Description

""Describes the emerging use of collaborative scenario planning practices in urban and regional planning, and includes case studies, an overview of digital tools, and a project evaluation framework. Concludes with a discussion of how scenarios can be used to address urban inequalities. Intended for a broad audience"--Provided by the publisher"--




Planning Cities for the Future


Book Description

The book delivers an inspiring, first-hand insight into the state of urban competitiveness and how cities may make the best use of it. . . Kresl gives a well-informed insight into urban problems and related strategies, based on a carefully deployed comparative approach. Markus Hesse, Growth and Change This volume delves into issues overlooked in many texts about the EU and will be useful for courses in European and international studies and local government. Recommended. G.T. Potter, Choice Peter Kresl brings unique and invaluable empirical evidence, from the early 1990s through to 2005, to examine the relationship between urban competitiveness and economic-strategic planning for ten internationally networked cities within the EU. Planning Cities for the Future links the study of urban economic competitiveness with urban planning and is able to ascertain the crucial factors for success in this area of public policy. These factors include effective governance, leadership and monitoring of performance. The author also reveals how economic turbulence macro-economic stagnation, the emergence of competitors such as China and Central Europe and the introduction of the euro for example all have distinct impacts on the economic development of cities. He also suggests that today s economic strengths may create tomorrow s social pathologies, a fact which city planners must always keep in mind. Peter Kresl s book offers examples of cities that got it right and others that did not. Scholars and researchers interested in public sector economics, urban economic development and planning as well as city planners themselves will find much to interest and stimulate them in this book.




Designing Future Cities for Wellbeing


Book Description

Designing Future Cities for Wellbeing draws on original research that brings together dimensions of cities we know have a bearing on our health and wellbeing – including transportation, housing, energy, and foodways – and illustrates the role of design in delivering cities in the future that can enhance our health and wellbeing. It aims to demonstrate that cities are a complex interplay of these various dimensions that both shape and are shaped by existing and emerging city structures, governance, design, and planning. Explaining how to consider these interconnecting dimensions in the way in which professionals and citizens think about and design the city for future generations’ health and wellbeing, therefore, is key. The chapters draw on UK case and research examples and make comparison to international cities and examples. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students in planning, public policy, public health, and design.




Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond


Book Description

The city in the twenty-first century faces major challenges, including social and economic stratification, wasteful consumption of resources, transportation congestion, and environmental degradation. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and major metropolitan areas, and in the next two decades the number of city dwellers is estimated to reach five billion. This puts enormous pressures on transportation systems, housing stock, and infrastructure such as energy, waste, and water, which directly influences the emissions of greenhouse gases. As the long emergency awaits us, urgent questions remain: How will our cities survive? How can we combat and reconcile urban growth with sustainable use of resources for future generations to thrive? Where and how urbanism comes into the picture and what “sustainable” urban forms can do in light of these events are some of the issues Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond explores. With more than sixty essays, including contributions by Andrés Duany, Saskia Sassen, Peter Newman, Douglas Farr, Henry Cisneros, Peter Hall, Sharon Zukin, Peter Eisenman, and others, this book is a unique perspective on architecture, urban planning, environmental and urban design, exploring ways for raising quality of life and the standard of living in a new modern era by creating better and more viable places to live.




Region


Book Description

"Published in cooperation with the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota."




New Urbanism and Beyond


Book Description

Best defined as the art of shaping the built environment, urban design seeks to understand and analyze the variety of forces—social, economic, cultural, legal, ecological, and aesthetic—that affect how we live. The complex challenges facing cities today—scarcity of resources, growing economic divisions, and rampant sprawl, among others—are forcing a reconsideration of urban design. New Urbanism, a leading movement within urban design, advocates a return to small-town urban forms: human-scale, pedestrian-friendly streets, a reinvigoration of cities, and a stop to suburban sprawl. This new volume, drawing on a conference and debates at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, comprehensively examines New Urbanism today and speculates about it’s future. With contributions from Christopher Alexander, Leon Krier, Peter Hall, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, William McDonough, Peter Calthorpe, Jan Gehl, Lars Lerup, Edward Soja, and Saskia Sassen, among others, New Urbanism and Beyond is both a comprehensive primer on urban design and a provocation for practitioners, historians, and citizens everywhere.




Urban Futures


Book Description

Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.




Planning Cities With Young People and Schools


Book Description

Offering the overlooked but essential viewpoint of young people from low-income communities of color and their public schools, Planning Cities With Young People and Schools offers an urgently needed set of best-practice recommendations for urban planners to change the status quo and reimagine the future of our cities for and with young people. Working with more than 10,000 students over two decades from the San Francisco Bay Area, to New York, to Tohoku, Japan, this work produces a wealth of insights on issues ranging from environmental planning, housing, transportation, regional planning, and urban education. Part I presents a theory of change for planning more equitable, youth-friendly cities by cultivating intergenerational communities of practice where young people work alongside city planners and adult professionals. Part II explores youth engagement in resilience, housing, and transportation planning through an analysis of literature and international examples of engaging children and youth in city planning. Part III speaks directly to practitioners, scholars, and students alike, presenting "Six Essentials for Planning Just and Joyful Cities" as necessary precursors to effective city planning with and for our most marginalized, children, youth, and public schools. For academics, policy makers, and practitioners, this book raises the importance of education systems and young people as critical to urban planning and the future of our cities.




Inventing Future Cities


Book Description

How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future. Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected; in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries. Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities; argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy; describes the future “high-frequency,” real-time streaming city; considers urban sprawl and urban renewal; and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovation—an unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.




Future Cities


Book Description

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.