How can human communities sustain a long-term existence on a small planet? This challenge grows ever more urgent as the threat of global warming increases. Planning for Sustainability presents a wide-ranging, intellectually well-grounded and accessible introduction to the concept of planning for more sustainable and livable communities. The text explores topics such as how more compact and walkable cities and towns might be created, how local ecosystems can be restored, how social inequalities might be reduced, how greenhouse gas emissions might be lowered, and how more sustainable forms of economic development can be brought about. The second edition has been extensively revised and updated throughout, including an improved structure with chapters now organized under three sections: the nature of sustainable planning, issues central to sustainable planning, and scales of sustainable planning. New material includes greater discussion of climate change, urban food systems, the relationships between public health and the urban environment, and international development. Building on past schools of planning theory, Planning for Sustainability lays out a sustainability planning framework that pays special attention to the rapidly evolving institutions and power structures of a globalizing world. By considering in turn each scale of planning—international, national, regional, municipal, neighborhood, and site and building—the book illustrates how sustainability initiatives at different levels can interrelate. Only by weaving together planning initiatives and institutions at different scales, and by integrating efforts across disciplines, can we move towards long-term human and ecological well-being.

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As global warming advances, regions around the world are engaging in revolutionary sustainability planning - but with social equity as an afterthought. California is at the cutting edge of this movement, not only because its regulations actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also because its pioneering environmental regulation, market innovation, and Left Coast politics show how to blend the "three Es" of sustainability--environment, economy, and equity. Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions is the first book to explain what this grand experiment tells us about the most just path moving forward for cities and regions across the globe. The book offers chapters about neighbourhoods, the economy, and poverty, using stories from practice to help solve puzzles posed by academic research. Based on the most recent demographic and economic trends, it overturns conventional ideas about how to build more livable places and vibrant economies that offer opportunity to all. This thought-provoking book provides a framework to deal with the new inequities created by the movement for more livable - and expensive - cities, so that our best plans for sustainability are promoting more equitable development as well. This book will appeal to students of urban studies, urban planning and sustainability as well as policymakers, planning practitioners, and sustainability advocates around the world.

Story and Sustainability explores the role of story in planning theory and practice, with the goal of creating U.S. cities able to balance competing claims for economic growth, environmental health, and social justice. In the book, urban practitioners and scholars from fields as diverse as American studies, English, geography, history, planning, and criminal justice reflect critically on the traditional exclusionary power of storytelling and on its potential to facilitate the transformations of imagination, theory, and practice necessary to create sustainable, democratic American cities. The book begins with an editors' introduction identifying story, sustainable U.S. cities, and democracy as the three key themes. Part I advances and refines these concepts, connects them to contemporary U.S. urban planning, and provides tools that can be used when reading and interpreting the texts in part II. Part II exemplifies, amplifies, and modifies the key themes and arguments through the presentation of eight texts: theoretical and experiential, academic and nonacademic, expository and narrative, and familiar and unfamiliar. The combined focus on story and urban sustainability makes this book a unique contribution to planning literature.

As the world becomes more urbanised, solutions are required to solve current challenges for three arenas of sustainability: social sustainability, environmental sustainability and urban economic sustainability. This edited volume interrogates innovative solutions for sustainability in cities around the world. The book draws on a group of 12 international case studies, including Vancouver and Calgary in Canada, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US (North America), Yogyakarta in Indonesia, Seoul in Korea (South-East Asia), Medellin in Colombia (South America), Helsinki in Finland, Freiburg in Germany and Seville in Spain (Europe). Each case study provides key facts about the city, presents the particular urban sustainability challenge and the planning innovation process and examines what trade-offs were made between social, environmental and economic sustainability. Importantly, the book analyses to what extent these planning innovations can be translated from one context to another. This book will be essential reading to students, academics and practitioners of urban planning, urban sustainability, urban geography, architecture, urban design, environmental sciences, urban studies and politics.

This book includes contributions from scientists and representatives from government and non-governmental organisations working in the field of land management and use and on management of fires. The book is truly interdisciplinary and has both a research and application-oriented dimension. The list of topics includes sustainability and water management; sustainability and biodiversity conservation; the future sustainability of nature-based industries such as agriculture, mining, tourism, fisheries and forestry; sustainability, people and livelihoods; sustainability and landscapes planning; sustainability and land use planning; handling and managing forest fires. The papers are innovative and cross-cutting, and many have practice-based experiences. Also, this book, prepared by the Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Programme (IUSDRP) and the World Sustainable Development Research and Transfer Centre (WSD-RTC), reiterates the need to promote a sustainable use of land resources today.

Sustainability Policy, Planning and Gentrification in Cities explores the growing convergences between urban sustainability policy, planning practices and gentrification in cities. Via a study of governmental policy and planning initiatives and informal, community-based forms of sustainability planning, the book examines the assemblages of actors and interests that are involved in the production of sustainability policy and planning and their connection with neighbourhood-level and wider processes of environmental gentrification. Drawing from international urban examples, policy and planning strategies that guide both the implementation of urban intensification and the planning of new sustainable communities are considered. Such strategies include the production of urban green spaces and other environmental amenities through public and private sector and civil society involvement. The resulting production of exclusionary spaces and displacement in cities is problematic and underlines the paradoxical associations between sustainability and gentrified urban development. Contemporary examples of sustainability policy and planning initiatives are identified as ways by which environmental practices increasingly factor into both official and informal rationales and enactments of social exclusion, eviction and displacement. The book further considers the capacity for progressive sustainability policy and planning practices, via community-based efforts, to dismantle exclusion and displacement and encourage social and environmental equity and justice in urban sustainability approaches. This is a timely book for researchers and students in urban studies, environmental studies and geography with a particular interest in the growing presence of environmental gentrification in cities.