Planning Climate Smart and Wise Cities


Book Description

This book provides information that facilitates integrated climate actions in cities, leveraging disruptive technologies, business models, policies, financing, and leadership solutions. It fosters the development of climate smart and wise cities. It reviews the major developments of climate actions in cities and combines climate environment and energy technology, policy and financing instruments. A range of distinguished authors assess the experiences thus far and also consider future development from both theoretical and practical perspectives. They also discuss many policy and technical options, including climate smart and wise city planning, inclusion of urban nature, international and national carbon market mechanisms and measuring its impact and digital transformation. Moreover, attention is paid to the role of natural principles, the role of transparency principles and to aspects of democratic climate governance within a climate action scheme. This book makes clear that the carbon neutrality, sustainability, circularity, efficiency, connectivity and resiliency of cities depend to a large extent on the specific digital technologies and the leadership reshaping our cities. Discussing multidisciplinary aspects of climate action, this book offers new insights to academics, policymakers and practitioners both in the public and private sectors. Those insights are not only retrospective, relevant for understanding the past, but they are also prospective and forward-looking, guiding the achievements of the SDGs and the climate goals.




Low-Carbon Smart Cities


Book Description

This book aims to integrate climate mitigation and adaptation tools into conventional urban planning. It emphasizes the value and importance of ICT as connected technology. The author believes that ICT and IOT can facilitate controlling climate change attributes when deployed with appropriate ingredients and composition in cities in an integrated comprehensive manner. It was written with the author's firm belief that cities play an important role in mitigating climate change by reducing energy consumption, promoting the use of renewable energy sources, or by trading emission permits and selling Certified Emission Rights (CERs). This book looks at green growth based on the circular economy using green smart technology as a sustainable tool for green economic development. Also for climate change adaptation, cities have to take actions to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change on people, property and ecosystems in the urban planning process. It has been written with the author's works for Urban Environment Accords (UEA) and International Urban Training Center (IUTC) in collaboration with UNEP, World Bank, UNFCCC and UN-HABITAT. It can be used as a training source book for city climate planners and urban practitioners of local governments. It will be utilized as a more practical guidebook for climate change policy makers as well as a futuristic research agenda for next generations.




Solved


Book Description

David Miller presents a compelling case that significant progress can be made at the local level by duplicating the actions of nine leading cities around the world.




Developing National Urban Policies


Book Description

This book discusses and analyzes past and ongoing national urban policy development efforts from around the globe, particularly those that can lead the way toward smart and green cities. In view of the adoption of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially the goal to have cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, urban policies that can help achieve this goal are urgently needed. The UN-Habitat (HABITAT III) puts national urban policies at the heart of implementing and rethinking the urban agenda, and identifies them as being integral to the equitable and sustainable development of nations. Against this background, this important book, which gathers contributions from academics, planners and urban specialists, reviews existing urban policies from developing and developed nations, discusses various countries’ smart and green urban policies, and outlines the way forward. As such, it is essential reading for all social scientists, planners, designers, architects, and policymakers working on urban development around the world.




Smart Cities and Smart Spaces: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications


Book Description

As populations have continued to grow and expand, many people have made their homes in cities around the globe. With this increase in city living, it is becoming vital to create intelligent urban environments that efficiently support this growth and simultaneously provide friendly and progressive environments to both businesses and citizens alike. Smart Cities and Smart Spaces: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is an innovative reference source that discusses social, economic, and environmental issues surrounding the evolution of smart cities. Highlighting a range of topics such as smart destinations, urban planning, and intelligent communities, this multi-volume book is designed for engineers, architects, facility managers, policymakers, academicians, and researchers interested in expanding their knowledge on the emerging trends and topics involving smart cities.




Deeper City


Book Description

Deeper City is the first major application of new thinking on ‘deeper complexity’, applied to grand challenges such as runaway urbanization, climate change and rising inequality. The author provides a new framework for the collective intelligence – the capacity for learning and synergy – in many-layered cities, technologies, economies, ecologies and political systems. The key is in synergistic mapping and design, which can move beyond smart ‘winner-takes-all’ competition, towards wiser human systems of cooperation where ‘winners-are-all’. Forty distinct pathways ‘from smart to wise’ are mapped in Deeper City and presented for strategic action, ranging from local neighbourhoods to global finance. As an atlas of the future, and resource library of pathway mappings, this book expands on the author’s previous work, City-Region 2020. From a decade of development and testing, Deeper City combines visual thinking with a narrative style and practical guidance. This book will be indispensable for those seeking a sustainable future – students, politicians, planners, systems designers, activists, engineers and researchers. A new postscript looks at how these methods can work with respect to the 2020 pandemic, and asks, ‘How can we turn crisis towards transformation?'




Managing the Climate Crisis


Book Description

Natural disasters from heat waves to coastal and river flooding will inevitably become worse because of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Managing them is possible, but planners, designers, and policymakers need to advance adaptation and preventative measures now. Managing the Climate Crisis: Designing and Building for Floods, Heat, Drought and Wildfire by design and planning experts Jonathan Barnett and Matthijs Bouw is a practical guide to addressing this urgent national security problem. Barnett and Bouw draw from the latest scientific findings and include many recent, real-world examples to illustrate how to manage seven climate-related threats: flooding along coastlines, river flooding, flash floods from extreme rain events, drought, wildfire, long periods of high heat, and food shortages.




Planning for Climate Change


Book Description

This book provides an overview of the large and interdisciplinary literature on the substance and process of urban climate change planning and design, using the most important articles from the last 15 years to engage readers in understanding problems and finding solutions to this increasingly critical issue. The Reader’s particular focus is how the impacts of climate change can be addressed in urban and suburban environments—what actions can be taken, as well as the need for and the process of climate planning. Both reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as adapting to future climate are explored. Many of the emerging best practices in this field involve improving the green infrastructure of the city and region—providing better on-site stormwater management, more urban greening to address excess heat, zoning for regional patterns of open space and public transportation corridors, and similar actions. These actions may also improve current public health and livability in cities, bringing benefits now and into the future. This Reader is innovative in bringing climate adaptation and green infrastructure together, encouraging a more hopeful perspective on the great challenge of climate change by exploring both the problems of climate change and local solutions.







Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change


Book Description

From the bestselling author of Ecohouse, this fully revised edition of Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change provides unique insights into how we can protect our buildings, cities, infra-structures and lifestyles against risks associated with extreme weather and related social, economic and energy events. Three new chapters present evidence of escalating rates of environmental change. The authors explore the growing urgency for mitigation and adaptation responses that deal with the resulting challenges. Theoretical information sits alongside practical design guidelines, so architects, designers and planners can not only see clearly what problems they face, but also find the solutions they need, in order to respond to power and water supply needs. Considers use of materials, structures, site issues and planning in order to provide design solutions. Examines recent climate events in the US and UK and looks at how architecture was successful or not in preventing building damage. Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change is an essential source, not just for architects, engineers and planners facing the challenges of designing our building for a changing climate, but also for everyone involved in their production and use.