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The paper records the spatial dynamics and water consumption pattern through statistical and spatial evidence. The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of land use land cover change on ...

The literature is increasingly approaching the participation of households in the delivery of urban services through the lens of co-production. However, there has been no in-depth exploration of the relationship between incremental changes in the urban fabric (urban typologies and morphologies) and the forms of adaptations of co-produced water and sanitation services (WSS). The paper draws on three planned neighbourhoods in Hanoi to examine these incremental changes by considering the transformation of the neighbourhood at different scales and the consequent evolution of the sociotechnical arrangements for the delivery of water and sanitation services. By exploring forms of reconfiguration of the built environment and embedded water infrastructures, the paper outlines the possibility of an alternate reading of service co-production initiatives as incremental spatial practices, with an emphasis on the role of technology in allowing transformation processes., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Urban infrastructure investment needs in the developing world are immense, particularly when the additional costs associated with lower carbon, more climate-resilient options are considered. These cannot possibly be financed from fiscal sources and ODA flows alone; private financing will need to be accessed. Focusing on the ability of city governments and subnational urban utilities to mobilize private finance, this paper makes two core arguments. First, private investment in municipal infrastructure requires robust institutional, fiscal and regulatory systems that are often absent in developing countries. Establishing such systems often requires policy and institutional reform, much of which lies beyond the competence and control of city governments themselves. Second, while the marginal investment needs related to climate mitigation and adaptation complicate and aggravate the picture, they do not alter the fundamental requirements of private investors. Put simply, municipalities and utilities will need to satisfy the requirements of regular private finance before they can attract green private finance. This paper looks across the main avenues for city governments to mobilize private finance – municipal borrowing, public–private partnerships, and land value capture instruments – and identifies four broad factors that determine the potential size and scope of city leveraging activity. It then offers a new framework to understand where the most pressing constraints to private investment readiness lie and proposes priority measures that local and national governments, together with development partners and other stakeholders, can take to address them.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda recognise the role of cities in achieving sustainable development. However, these agendas were agreed and signed by national governments and thus implementing them at the local level requires a process of adaptation or localisation. In this paper, we analyse five aspects that practitioners and researchers need to consider when localising them: (1) delimitation of the urban boundary; (2) integrated governance; (3) actors; (4) synergies and trade-offs and (5) indicators. These considerations are interrelated, and while not exhaustive, provide an important initial step for reflection on the challenges and opportunities of working with these global agendas at the local level. The paper draws on the inception phase of an international comparative transdisciplinary research project in seven cities on four continents: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Cape Town (South Africa), Gothenburg (Sweden), Kisumu (Kenya), Malmo (Sweden), Sheffield (UK) and Shimla (India).

This paper presents a conceptual exploration of Urban Agriculture in Portugal. We argue that Portuguese Urban Agriculture primarily focuses on food production for self-consumption and that its links with the other components of urban as a system are quite limited.To substantiate our argument several Urban Agriculture international definitions are presented and critically analysed along with: 1) interviews of relevant key actors; and, 2) a web search based on key words. We conclude that there is a need to clarify the very concept of Urban Agriculture among actors involved. This could be achieved through a national network able to raise a must needed debate about this promising sector. Political decision makers, civil society, and planners, among others should be involved in this collaborative process. Finally, the paper brings some reflections on what the Portuguese experience contributes to the broader debate and definitions of Urban Agriculture.

This paper provides a brief history of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) core project of the erstwhile International Human Dimensions Programme on GEC and the evolution of the science it supported and advanced from 2006 to 2017. This paper arises out of its synthesis phase, which concluded by planning the transition into an urban component of Future Earth. This legacy is vital in the context of our now predominantly urban planet and the associated flowering of urban research and related policy initiatives. The paper also analyses UGEC’s role and contribution as a global science coordination (networking) project and, on this basis, offers guidance and future research suggestions for the urbanization and environmental change community.

Global challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity and poverty must increasingly be tackled in cities. While cities can be significant contributors to climate change and resource scarcity, and face considerable risks as a consequence of these, they are also central to the solutions for these challenges. The quality of infrastructure, reliability of service provision and other economic and political conditions in urban areas shape levels of resource use by, and exposure to risks for, residents. This paper – which introduces a special issue on resilience and resource efficiency at the city scale – introduces these two concepts and explores the nexus between them. It uses several case studies from different contexts to illustrate the relationship between these ideas, and describes how the papers in the issue engage with them.

This paper examines the asset vulnerability and livelihood strategies of refugees and the urban poor in slum settlements of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Asset Vulnerability Framework is used as the analytical framework of how household’s assets are affected by vulnerability. Using qualitative analysis, factors which impact on the livelihood assets of both groups are examined. The paper focuses on the five main assets as indicated by Moser, while conceptualising further the assets which both populations aspire to accumulate, and which are necessary for them to prosper – rights, in this case the Right to the City. The paper, therefore, attempts to develop linkages between these areas: asset vulnerability, displacement and the Right to the City.

Many have emphasised the importance of strengthening urban system resilience. However, resilience can affect cities in adverse ways. Weak governance in cities in developing countries has detrimental outcomes, which are reinforced by the strong resilience of the urban system. Thus, breaking the resilience of urban systems in the first place is necessary to advance the agenda of sustainability avoiding the return to the initial (unsustainable) state.The paper examines the case of solid waste management (SWM) in the city of Penang Island, Malaysia. Three main factors facilitated the weakening of the system resilience and improved resource efficiency in SWM: engagement of civil society, local control of waste management and institutions that bridged the intergovernmental relations. The paper argues that defining the right system boundaries and having a combination of external and internal pressures over the system can help to break resilience and advance the sustainability agenda in cities.

Rental housing is increasingly becoming the key shelter option for the poor living in and moving into cities, including those living in informal settlements. The paper revisits the production of rental housing in informal settlements within the new contours of a neo-liberalism with stronger social agendas in Latin America drawing on the case of landlords in Brazilian favelas. The contributions of the paper are twofold: first, it explores the different elements impacting the development of rental housing in informal settlements in Brazil, from the socio-economic to the political, from the state to the intra-settlement dynamics; and second, it assesses how these conditions determine the way landlords operate and produce rental housing. The analyses add to our understanding of the contemporary forms of housing informality reproduction in emerging economies and how individuals pervade the circuits of market and survival constructing their livelihoods on the basis of the economic and social resources from renting.

Adaptive governance is an emerging theory in natural resource management. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by exploring the potential of adaptive governance for delivering resilience and sustainability in the urban context. We explore emerging challenges to transitioning to urban resilience and sustainability: bringing together multiple scales and institutions; facilitating a social–ecological-systems approach; and embedding social and environmental equity into visions of urban sustainability and resilience. Current approaches to adaptive governance could be helpful for addressing these first two challenges but not in addressing the third. Therefore, this paper proposes strengthening the institutional foundations of adaptive governance by engaging with institutional theory. We explore this through empirical research in the Rome Metropolitan Area, Italy. We argue that explicitly engaging with these themes could lead to a more substantive urban transition strategy and contribute to adaptive governance theory.

This paper investigates spatial distribution of places of worship (PoW) and its implications on sustainable land use planning in a rapidly urbanising city of Kumasi, Ghana. Using semi-structured interviews, document reviews and agency consultations, this paper focused on three issues: (a) the location and distribution of PoW, (b) factors considered in the location of these PoW by faith groups and (c) planning implications of PoW. Findings indicate that location decisions vary according to different faith groups. However, none of the faith groups interviewed considered land use planning regulations as key decision-making factor, as proximity to members, affordability and availability of land remained dominant factors. This situation has created avoidable land use conflicts and has become an additional burden on urban planning authorities who are already faced with pervasive land use challenges such as slum development and urban sprawl.

Co-production in climate change has arisen in response to improving climate knowledge. Climate service co-production provides climate knowledge for decision-making, benefiting vulnerable communities with useful and usable information such as flooding risk areas. A climate service co-production project, including mapping technologies, has been conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia. However, it has not been integrated into mainstream spatial planning. This paper investigates an enabling environment for the integration of climate service co-production and spatial planning using a collaborative governance framework. We conducted semi-structured interviews, photovoice, and focus group discussions. The results highlight factors to enable integration; (1) an institutional reform to put climate service co-production on the agenda, (2) top-down priorities aligned with local-level needs, (3) local government will and leadership to execute the tasks and actions towards climate resilience, (4) trust of the local government with the community, (5) integrated geospatial data to have an effective climate knowledge to spatial planning.

Sustainable development is the trade-offs among social, economic and ecological objectives and is required to maintain sustainability of overall system. The sustainability of the built environment is partially based on individual behaviour. It has been argued that to improve sustainability, the changes should be brought in the individual behaviour patterns, replacing the unsustainable living patterns with the sustainable ones. The unsustainable behaviour patterns are 'embedded' and 'deep-rooted' in the normal living behaviour of individuals that it is not so easy to change them only by creating sustainable policies. There are several reasons why the unsustainable lifestyle patterns are easily adapted, and restrict change. This paper will use insights and case study examples from social practice theory in understanding those reasons. The aim of this paper is to elaborate how sustainable living practices can be brought about at community level for the individuals to easily adapt as part of their daily lives. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Cities are key actors in addressing climate change. Through local policies and regulation, participation in national programmes, and membership in transnational networks, cities have been shown to play an important role in the new configurations of climate change governance beyond the nation-state. There has so far been little attention, however, on how cities in the global South fit into this agenda and how climate policies become integrated and transformed in local municipalities with varying levels of development and differing urban priorities. This paper addresses this gap by bringing together literatures on cities and climate change with urban policy mobilities to explore how mobile urban climate policies are understood and embedded within municipal governments of second-tier cities in India. Based on the empirical work in five municipalities, this paper shows how a municipal network seeks to make climate policies mobile and how local municipal governments engage with such mobile policies. I suggest ...

The success of London’s bid is often explained in terms of its uniqueness in promising to deliver a lasting and inclusive legacy to a deprived part of East London. This paper focuses on two dimensions of housing legacy, displacement and legacy housing and argues that there is nothing particularly unique about London’s strategy in this regard and questions whether mega events such as the Olympic Games are the best vehicle for securing long-term housing benefits for deprived populations. The paper explores the changing trajectory of London’s housing legacy plans from 2005 to 2012 arguing that original plans overstated the potential housing legacy using this as a trump card to displace existing populations and win support for the bid. Over time there has been a weakening commitment to the provision of affordable housing legacy and social transformation for existing communities. The shifting political, economic and policy terrain accounts in part for this however, it is argued that housing legacy plans (beyon...

Urban sanitation presents one of the most significant service delivery challenges related to poverty alleviation and sustainable development in the developing world. The past decade has witnessed innovations in service delivery approaches for un-served rural and urban settlements with a clear policy shift to community-based approaches which attempt to overcome the supply-led, over-engineered sanitation solutions of the past decades. This paper presents two examples of new developments: the urban-focused Household-centred Environmental Sanitation (HCES) and the rural-focused Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approaches. The internationally renowned CLTS approach has achieved considerable success since its introduction, by harnessing community and small private sector capacity to solve sanitation problems locally. Experience with validation of the HCES approach in a variety of urban sites in Africa, Asia and Latin America is presented in the second part of the paper- highlighting some of the lessons learned. The paper closes by arguing that a combination of HCES and CLTS, two field-tested methodologies, has the potential to improve the sustainability of sanitation service interventions.

This paper takes an urban planning perspective on environmental justice by separately analysing vulnerable socioeconomic groups for multiple environmental burden (EB) at the neighbourhood level in ...

This paper demonstrates empirically that Tokyo’s rapid post-war growth coincided with decreasing intra-urban inequalities in the special ward area, both in terms of private and public living standa...

Interest in the adoption of urban agriculture (UA) has grown in recent years. The compatibility of UA with the urban social context, in particular with urban stake- holders’ attitudes, is crucial for its successful implementation and represents one of the key factors influencing its development. To this end, a literature review on different approaches to analysing stakeholders’ and farmers’ perceptions of UA is performed. The paper identifies the main approaches to assessing these aspects and designs an integrated framework to support the development of context-tailored analytical approaches for UA drivers’ and stakeholder perceptions. The study aims to address and solve potential conflicts between UA practitioners and urban stake- holders and adapt the implementation of UA to contextual factors. This increases the possibility of developing successful UA strategies that meet the challenges currently facing urban food systems.

International audience; The article examines the dynamics of access to electricity in two West African cities: Cotonou (Benin) and Ibadan (Nigeria). Due to poor supply from the grid, households are developing varied ways of accessing electricity, based on different socio-technical dispositifs. In this paper we first demonstrate that access to electricity is based on co- production processes that must be approached from a multi-scale perspective (from the household to the urban scale). We then argue that particular attention to the socio-technical and spatial dimension of co-production arrangements makes it pos- sible to interpret urban electrical configurations and their evolution. We thus show that co-production processes, relying on many actors and technologies to meet a growing and diversified demand for electricity in cities, support an ongoing move- ment of extension-hybridisation of electricity configurations on an urban scale, thus offering an interesting perspective on power changes in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper examines the role of actors, policies and technology in the evolution of a basic urban transport service by investigating a complex range of factors shaping the inception and adaptation ...

Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-12T02:05:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2020-01-01 In the context of a globalised interdisciplinary moment, where boundary-crossing research collaborations are valorised, this paper considers encounters between multidisciplinary researchers. Presenting empirics and reflections from an international project where social scientists and engineers sought to collaborate, communicate and address complex challenges associated with sustainable urban development, we question a series of assumptions about interdisciplinary research. Importantly, we pause to consider the practical implications of doing this work. In particular, we draw attention to the spaces of interdisciplinarity, from the field to the lab and the meeting room, the role of researchers’ reflexivity and positionality, and the importance of being aware of the embodied, emotional realities of such work. In so doing, we call for more critical, evidence-based reflection upon the lived in/congruities of interdisciplinary practices. School of Geography Earth and Environmental Sciences University of Birmingham Faculty of Education and Humanities University of Northampton School of Engineering Guaratinguetá Department of Energy São Paulo State University (Unesp) Institute of Science and Technology São José Dos Campos Department of Environmental Engineering São Paulo State University (Unesp) School of Engineering Guaratinguetá Department of Electrical Engineering São Paulo State University (Unesp) School of Engineering Guaratinguetá Department of Civil Engineering São Paulo State University (Unesp) School of Engineering Guaratinguetá Department of Energy São Paulo State University (Unesp) Institute of Science and Technology São José Dos Campos Department of Environmental Engineering São Paulo State University (Unesp) School of Engineering Guaratinguetá Department of Electrical Engineering São Paulo State University (Unesp) School of Engineering Guaratinguetá Department of Civil Engineering São Paulo State University (Unesp)

This paper addresses the persistent challenges in housing the urban poor in Bangladesh. In particular, it explores the empirical evidence on informal networks of the urban poor as they relate to se...

The Free Café is a citizen-driven collective in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands that serves a free meal biweekly, using food that would otherwise be thrown away. While principally attempting to create a space where financial pressures and social status are lifted, the group also works to raise awareness about the environmental and societal impacts of food. Using Gibson-Graham’s community economies (CE) lens to analyse the Free Café, this paper aims to understand how urban citizen collectives are organised and governed, to better facilitate local action in food initiatives. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, this research focuses on the daily practices, interactions, organisation and challenges surrounding the Free Café, to draw lessons about urban collective action and CE. Though findings indicate internal conflicts and contradictions, through sharing its vision and opportunities, the café is found to be valuable to food-waste awareness-raising and experimentation towards sustainable post-capitalist societies.

The paper examines agricultural livelihood effects of urban sprawl and farmers' response in peri-urban Kumasi, Ghana, involving in-depth interviews with sixty farmers (n = 60) and four key informan...

This paper explores how organised urban communities in Bangkok are planning for and responding to environmental and other crises, to identify approaches to fostering more sustainable, inclusive and...

The paper aims to take forward recent research concerning the development of grassroots innovations and sustainability transitions in housing. We introduce and empirically assess a multi-level, pro...

This paper presents a reflection on the implementation of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and its social and spatial repercussions. It incorporates results of research that comprises (i)...

Sekondi-Takoradi has been a preferred city in Ghana for many individuals after the discovery of oil in the area in 2007. This paper sought to analyze the land-use/cover change of Sekondi-Takoradi M...

Peri-urban land access in Tanzania is adversely embroiled in a dual system that is both formal and informal. Each system is driven by different actors with diverging interests. This paper a...

In this paper, we focus on the rationale for implementing the fare-free public transportation system (FFPTS) in Tallinn, Estonia, that took place on 1 January 2013. Through a series of interviews w...

This paper investigates sustainable urban aspects of the Great Bazaar of Tabriz (GBT) in Iran, classified as the world’s largest covered bazaar. Qualitative and statistical research methods employe...

Measuring and comparing sustainable development levels of cities are essential procedures in creating and maintaining sustainable urban futures. This paper introduces a new urban sustainability ass...

This paper deliberates on the importance of two major themes, (a) emphasis shift from traditional urban planning approach currently practised in such cities as Tehran to a spatial metropolitan plan...

We propose a framework for a package of Urban Sustainability and Resilience Indicators (USRI) based on a holistic approach to urban dynamics that we name the ‘pyramid of urban resilience and sustainability’. We start with a concise discussion of the concepts of urban resilience and sustainability, their synergies and trade-offs. We then make a point of the need for an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to assess progress towards or away from urban sustainability and resilience; and delineate an analytical framework that enables a comprehensive approach to ‘the urban’ by addressing not only ecological but also economic, sociocultural and governance dimensions. We critically reflect on its potential (and limits) by applying it to the case of Mexico City. The paper presents preliminary results for the ecological dimension of such a framework, and insights from the case of solid waste.USRI offers the potential for a systemic approach to urban sustainability and resilience. Yet, some limitations a...

The complex task of place-making to build sustainable communities has been challenging yet compelling when finding solutions to intertwined issues on the environment, the economy and society. This paper examines the idea of sustainable place-making for building sustainable communities in the context of small urban municipalities (SUMs) in Ontario, Canada. For this purpose, a ‘small urban municipality’ is defined as a city or town that has adopted a local environmental action plan and/or an economic development strategy and has no more than 60,000 populations. It provides a conceptual review of place-making and explores how it is linked with the goal for urban sustainability in the context of SUMs in the Canadian way. The study seeks to answer this question: based on a survey of relevant professions, what are the constraints and factors facing cities, towns and townships in Ontario for creating sustainable communities in terms of place-making?

Resilience represents a key issue for modern societies. Resilience is related to sustainability as safeguarding environmental assets can reduce risk and provide resources to facilitate recovery. The methodology quantifies the disaster resilience of city ecosystems by measuring urban efficiency in the event of shocks, according to an anthropocentric perspective. Cities are modelled as hybrid social–physical networks (HSPNs), accounting for interrelations between the physical and social components. Seismic scenarios are run on diverse urban shapes and on the real case study of the city of Sarno. Results on synthetic HSPNs show consistency with the real case study, therefore the validity of the model is highlighted. Urban shapes or forms prove to have a significant impact on urban efficiency in terms of service delivery, and on urban disaster resilience. The methodology proposed in this paper could be a useful tool for urban planners, particularly in cities with high exposure to natural disasters.

Urban metabolism as a framework has enabled understanding the interactions between humans, natural, and built environment. The concept is multidisciplinary and urban metabolism models have been used in identifying certain issues of urban planning. Apart from sociopolitical and economic aspects, metabolism also has spatial dimension. The spatial dimension is reflected in the metabolic processes which is inherent in the problems of uneven socioecological metabolisms that persist in the production of urban spaces. Urban planning developed as a discipline for balanced spatial development of urban metabolic processes. For sustainable development of the city, it is necessary for urban planning to follow metabolic processes but in reality this need not always be the case. It is possible for planning and urban metabolism to be spatially inconsistent. The results presented in this paper show the costs of such a divergence in the water supply system of Bengaluru city.

The increasing demands for natural resources due to rapid population growth and the challenging environmental problems caused by global warming require a new systematic approach for the integration of sustainability into highly populated urban areas. In this paper, green infrastructure (GI) is studied as an efficient method for achieving sustainability in developing countries. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is considered as a case study. A multiscale landscape planning model is proposed for the inclusion and integration of productive networks on the edges of Tehran seven watercourses, to re-establish Tehran’s identity as a green city. Tehran, due to its location and presence of rural towns along valleys, is a good candidate for this integration. The seven watercources that pass through Tehran are studied as part of a cohesive urban plan for the future development of the city. Strategies for adapting this green integration method to other big developing metropolitans are proposed and investigated.

Social sustainability is gaining importance in the international urban development context; however, in India, the concept is unclear and under-represented. New approaches and tools at the level of urban policy, design and implementation are highly biased towards environmental sustainability focussing on “smart” technological innovations. This scant focus, coupled with massive and inequitable urban growth, is resulting in social crises that not only pose danger to the country’s stability but also represent some of the fundamental challenges to its sustainable future. Based on a detailed review of the literature on social sustainability, this paper explores its meaning and sets out its core components. It calls for humanising Indian cities and argues that a more comprehensive approach to the constituent but neglected “social” dimension of sustainable development which goes beyond the technical aspects of solving infrastructure-focused social issues to creating built environments that nurture strong urban c...

Little research examined how technical capacity contributes to smart growth applications. Therefore, this research paper applies case study analysis to investigate the effects of the technical capacity of city/town planning agencies on applications of smart growth policies to reduce urban sprawl. The case studies include 10 cities/towns located in different counties within the State of Maryland, USA. They represent four pairs/groups with comparable population size but different smart growth profiles.First, the researcher conducted content analysis of city/town comprehensive plans to assess how they have embraced smart growth policies. Then, she interviewed city/town planners to explore factors contributing to policy applications. The analysis indicates that city/town technical planning capacity (PC) is the most important factor contributing to smart growth applications. It shows that county applications of anti-sprawl policies lead cities/towns to adopt smart growth policies to manage future growth. In ad...

This paper uses a process of ecological reasoning to challenge normative concepts of sustainable urbanism. Ecological metaphor is often applied in a normative manner, with the assumption that ecologically derived design concepts are wholly positive and ‘sustainable’; however, this is not necessarily the case. Through a detailed case study of Hong Kong, we reveal that the interpretive nature of ecological urbanism can produce a variety of outcomes to either contribute to, by explicating and imagining, or undermine sustainability endeavours, by misleading or obscuring. Employing a situated narrative technique we challenge established ecological design concepts, such as ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘eco-efficiency’, with their cultural residuals of individualistic, mechanistic values. In their place, the notion of autopoiesis is proposed, reconceptualising Hong Kong as an interactive network of agents working to regain sovereignty over production, distribution and consumption patterns. The implications of this res...

Urban ecology is an emerging discipline providing opportunities for inclusion, incorporation and integration of methodologies from numerous disciplines across natural and social sciences. Studies have multiplied over the last few decades and the subject has expanded in scope from sheer dependence on ecological variables to socio-economic, political and cultural variables Within the contemporary context of Third World urbanisation process and urban development, this paper revisits the scope of urban ecology and attempts to further widen the purview of the discipline by incorporating the study of rural/peri-urban and urban linkages and their transforming interactions from political ecology and historical perspectives. By shedding light on the mutually interdependent interrelationship between the city and its peri-urban interface (PUI) and how it has transformed from a mutually reinforcing system to a truncated one, the Kolkata case study strongly emphasises the need for integrating political ecology and his...

Analyses of climate risks for urban low-income households are grounded in the concept of vulnerability. To address the dynamic nature of vulnerability, asset-based approaches to poverty reduction and social development advocate for identifying both risks and resilience. Applying the asset-based approach to a climate-change context brings into the discussion vulnerabilities associated with physical hazards and their impact on different types of capital assets. This paper analyses evidence from an informal settlement in Dhaka to identify the capital assets impacted by physical hazards and to develop a matrix identifying assets that can build the capacity of urban low-income households to adapt to climate extremes.

Impoverished communities often suffer not only from the lack of wealth, but also from a kind of democratic deficit. To be poor means not only not having money, but also being buffeted by the winds of fortune, with little sense of control over the major forces that commonly affect people’s lives. As a model of development, cooperatives have been promoted not only as a model for community wealth-building, but also as a form of empowerment due to their inherently democratic nature. But how democratic are they, really? This paper explores this question from the perspective of democratic theory, using a theoretical framework developed by the nineteenth-century political economist William Thompson, who laid out the principles on which the cooperative movement is based. An important element of Thompson’s theory is that the cooperative structure alters the socio-economic relations of their members, aligning their interests with one another on the basis of a strong principle of equality. It is this alignment of in...

The production of contextualised assessments of local climate change vulnerability serves to improve their usefulness in urban planning. For this purpose, a cross-sectoral participatory approach combining local and academic knowledge is vital. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of how such assessments can be effectively facilitated. Through the elaboration of a framework for joint knowledge production, the paper develops and applies ex-post evaluation criteria to analyse how the set-up and design of participatory assessments affected the identification of local climate vulnerability in two Swedish urban areas. These cases included a series of researcher-led stakeholder dialogues involving participants from various municipal departments, national agencies and research institutions. The results demonstrate that the project set-up affected the joint knowledge production by unifying relevant competences. However, occasionally, it also created conflict. The design of the dialogues influenced th...

The development of a holistic approach for the implementation of reuse strategies on vacant urban lands is essential if cities are to optimize the potential utility of these untapped resources as public amenity spaces, at a neighbourhood-, community- or city-wide planning scale. Many cities across the globe struggle with the presence of vacant and underutilized land in the urban environment. This is a wasted resource that has significant potential to contribute to a city’s green infrastructure/amenity capacity if the suitability of reuse strategies can be better understood. This paper presents a prototype community-based decision support tool to assist neighbourhood groups in completing a user-customizable vacant and underutilized land inventory at a neighbourhood, community or city-wide planning scale. The purpose of this research is to create an inventory that captures the relevant neighbourhood and site attributes in a way that can be conveyed to the user as a ‘site suitability index’ (or score). This ...

The issue of geographical scale in implementing sustainable urban development has not received much attention in sustainability research. Is it possible to locate sustainability efforts to one part of the city and by creating a spatial imbalance expect that these efforts gradually spread to the rest of the city? For this purpose this paper proposes a model of unbalanced sustainable development. The model is based on an old theory in development economics, namely unbalanced growth. The author contends that such a model should be suitable for many cities where the opportunities for more comprehensive city-wide sustainable development strategies are limited.

The creative city is a city able to generate economies of innovation, culture, research and artistic production, and strengthen its own identity capital. Looking at the experiences of creative cities, it may be observed that they revolve around the design, promotion and activation of urban areas established due to their particular local characteristics. Those areas become creative clusters as a result of economic and structural innovation, which is related to the execution of innovative projects achieved with the help of local development strategies based on the economy of excellence and territorial qualities. The most mature experiences of creative cities show us two types of creative clusters: cultural, which are created around activities such as fine arts, music, cinema, architecture and design, and whose initiation is encouraged and planned by local administration; and events, whose development stems from the organisation of major events or different kinds of recreational and cultural manifestations. Starting from such premises, this paper aims to explore the concept of creative cities and the main factors conditioning creativity in cities. These topics are addressed most directly in the literature review, with two case studies deepening understanding of the pragmatic strategies and processes underlying redevelopments within creative city framework. The two examples of creative urban projects concern Arabianranta in Helsinki, for the events cluster framework and HafenCity in Hamburg, for the cultural cluster framework. These cases inform a more sustainable version of creative city that is anchored in local history and identity, local economic nourishment and participation in redevelopment process and emphasise this endeavour as a process, thus incorporating risk and uncertainty.