Search

Growing evidence shows cities' climate change efforts can worsen inequities and social injustices. This paper starts to formulate a normative conception of social justice for urban climate change planning. It identifies what dimensions of social justice are articulated and how they are defined in the literature on equity in urban planning for climate change. It shows at least five dimensions are pertinent: creating transformations, promoting the well-being of the socially marginalized, recognition, inclusion in decision-making, and distributive justice. The paper concludes by discussing where further developments are needed to generate a comprehensive account of equitable urban planning for climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban areas mediate climate transformations and generate new forms of climate urbanism. Looking at climate action in the twelve fastest-growing cities in China with under one million people, this paper proposes a perspective on urban climate politics 'from elsewhere' that foregrounds the potential role of smaller urban areas in mediating climate transformations. The analysis reveals three climate action strategies that reflect practical, institutional, and personal spheres of climate transformations. Planning action in the personal sphere provides opportunities for urban transformations. A perspective 'from elsewhere' calls for greater attention to planning for diverse change strategies for climate transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

This section presents abstracts of papers on city planning published from 2007 to 2008, including "Streets, Sounds and Identity in Inter-war Harlem," by Clare Corbould, "(Re)making the Other, Heterosexualising Everyday Space," by Kath Browne, and "Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds," by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder.

The proliferation of informal settlements and growing risks of climate change across African cities pose core questions to urban planning theory and practice. Where do informal settlements fit into future climate adaptation plans? What constitutes a 'just' climate transformation for African urbanization? And how does a 'just' climate transformation address the concerns of Africans in informal settlements? We conduct a literature review to highlight the importance of local, community-based knowledge production and action in addressing African urbanization and climate change. We show how informality and climate change impact each other across diverse African cities and conduct a detailed case study based on Accra, Ghana. We argue that national and global approaches to planning for urbanization and climate change are required to strengthen local community-based knowledge production and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversations about how to tackle climate change often fail to incorporate the perspectives of activists from the Environmental Justice Movement and the Just Transition Alliance. Ignoring voices from workers and communities that have been in the sacrifice zones of environmental contamination often leads to "false solutions" that further exacerbate both the disproportionate impacts on communities of color and the threats from climate change. In this perspective, three EJ activists provide a clarification and reminder on why and how the terms environmental justice and just transition became critical to the movement for climate justice. Policies for climate justice planning are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing climate impacts and ambitious calls to decarbonize society pose unprecedented challenges for cities and their built environments, political economic systems, and governance institutions. This special issue invites planning scholars to consider how planning research can inform transformative climate initiatives and how planning itself needs to transform to better support climate transformation. In this introduction, we review definitions of transformation, introduce each of the six articles and their approaches to transformation, and explore cross-cutting tensions among them. We conclude with our reflections for future research that would help planning prepare for and contribute to climate transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban design is an essential component of planning for climate transformation. However, the concept of transformation in urban design is complicated by the problematic legacy of design-led mega-projects. Such projects, often called Haussmannization, are criticized as inattentive to existing landscape, built, and social environments. While corrective movements have partially addressed criticisms of Haussmannization, they can also hinder justice-centered climate transformation, by empowering already powerful interests to defend status quo conditions or justifying inequity-deepening interventions in the name of climate action, a phenomenon we label climate Haussmannization. We present a schema connecting transformative urban design with procedural, distributive, and recognitional justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on topics related to history and planning including attitudes towards menstruation in Elizabethan England, sexual fantasy in modern America, and feminism.

The Upper Texas Gulf Coast is vulnerable to weather-related hazards including drought. Climate change is likely to increase losses and reduce supplies of freshwater during drought. Resilience, briefly defined as the ability to reduce vulnerability, to drought is crucial to coastal communities. This article examines drought, reviews the resilience literature, analyzes one community’s efforts to address drought through their water resource management plans and their comprehensive plan, and concludes with a discussion regarding how resilience thinking can assist planners and their communities. First, resilience thinking facilitates the development of built environments that absorb change and persist. Second, resilience thinking encourages planners to keep options open across sectors and scales. Finally, resilience concepts can assist planners as they make decisions with limited knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstract on planning including a micro-level analysis of the Black voting during the civil rights movement, the influence of land-use planners on flood hazard mitigation and the use on public transport timetable data into health care accessibility modelling.

The article presents abstracts on various topics which include social life and civic education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the political aspect of neighborhood football clubs in Santiago, Chile and the legacy of urban renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.

The article presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

The article presents abstracts on planning-related topics which include an examination of the popularity of dancing in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1930s, an examination of how religious diversity in community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change and an examination of child labor in urban industries in the Dutch Republic.

The article presents abstracts on land use planning topics, including "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," "More Than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt's Contributions to Planning Knowledge" and "Methodology for the Survival Analysis of Urban Building Stocks."

The article presents abstracts of planning. They include "The Fall and Rise of the Local Community: A Comparative and Historical Perspective," by Hellmut Wollman, "The Compact Versus the Dispersed City: History of Planning Ideas on Sofia's Urban Form," by Sonia Hirt, and "A Paradigm for Practice," by Ronald D. Brunner.

Presents several abstracts featured in various journals as of August 2006. "Creating the Public Domain: Nineteenth-Century Local State Formation in Britain and the U.S.," by Alan Digaetano; "The Significance of Color Declines: A Re-Analysis of Skin Tone Differentials in Post-Civil Rights America," by Aaron Gullickson; "Deconstructing the City of Culture: The Long-Term Cultural Legacies of Glasgow 1990," by Beatriz García.

Presents abstracts of environmental planning research. They include "Integrating a performance-based approach into practice: A case study," "Local commitment to state-mandated planning in coastal North Carolina" and "Fiscal consequences of concentrated poverty in a metropolitan region."

Presents abstracts of several studies on environment and planning. "Explaining the Growth of British Multiple Retailing During the Golden Age," by Carlo Morelli; "Cities in the Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir," by Matthew Farish; "Geographers and the Tennessee Valley Authority," by Ronald Reed Boyce.

Presents abstracts of several studies on city planning. "Designing and Living in a New Industrial Suburb: Experiences in the Cannock Chase Coalfield From the 1950s to the 1970s," by Gareth Evans and Peter J. Larkham; "Learning to Shop in Zion: The Consumer Revolution in Great Basin Mormon Culture,1847-1910," by Greg Umbach; "Curing Congestion: Competing Plans for a Loop Highway and Parking Regulations in Boston in the 1920s," by Asha Weinstein.