This book offers a detailed examination of how urban areas can evolve while balancing growth, resilience, and ecological innovation. Through a variety of case studies and research-driven insights, it explores methods for improving climate resilience, reviving urban areas, and incorporating ecological frameworks into city planning. The book offers valuable strategies for developing dynamic, ecologically conscious cities by addressing critical issues such as urban redevelopment, disaster pre...

This introductory textbook with a global scope aims to train students of geography, sustainability, and urban and environmental studies to re-imagine and transform cities to meet climate, biodiversity, and sustainability challenges. A dedicated team of authors critically examine the relationships between nature and urban areas, sharing an inspiring account of how nature helps us re-think our cities and their futures. Prior to this textbook, literature for courses covering urban nature was ...

Smart cities promise to generate economic, social and environmental value through the seamless connection of urban services and infrastructure by digital technologies. However, there is scant evidence of how these activities can enhance social well-being and contribute to just and equitable communities.Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities provides one of the first examinations of how smart cities relate to environmental and social issues. It ad...

This book explores how the concept or urban experimentation is being used to reshape practices of knowledge production in urban debates about resilience, climate change governance, and socio-technical transitions.With contributions from leading scholars, and case studies from the Global North and South, from small to large scale cities, this book suggests that urban experiments offer novel modes of engagement, governance, and politics that both challenge and complement conventional...

Embedding climate resilient development principles in planning, urban design, and architecture means ensuring that transformation of the built environment helps achieve carbon neutrality, effective adaptation, and well-being for people and nature. Planners, urban designers, and architects are called to bridge the domains of research and practice and evolve their agency and capacity, developing methods and tools consistent across spatial scales to ensure the convergence of outcomes towards ...

Uniquely focused on the contributions smart cities can make to climate change resilience, Urban Climate Adaptation and Mitigation offers evidence-based scientific solutions for improving cities' abilities to prepare for, recover from, and adapt to global climate-related events. Beginning with the observation of global environmental change, this book explores what sustainable smart projects are, how they are adopted and evaluated, and how they can address climate change challenges. It bring...

In the twenty-first century, educators around the world are being told that they need to transform education systems to adapt young people for the challenges of a global digital knowledge economy. Too rarely, however, do we ask whether this future vision is robust, achievable or even desirable, whether alternative futures might be in development, and what other possible futures might demand of education.Drawing on ten years of research into educational innovation and socio-technica...

This new book explores how the professions responsible for enhancing the built environment's sustainability seek to deliver this new agenda, offering multi-perspective case studies and discussion to argue for a rethinking of the role of urban development professional.Showing how sustainability is rapidly becoming the norm for practitioners, the authors consider new types of professional knowledge, relationships between planning systems and property development, links between public...

This book traces the theoretical explanation for clusters back to the work of classical economists and their more modern disciples, who saw economic development as a process involving serious imbalances in the exploitation of resources. Initially, natural resource endowments explained the formation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century industrial districts. Today, geographical concentrations of scientific and creative knowledge are the key resource. But these require a support system, ...

In the face of increasing climate disruption, this book provides a design-centered investigation of how cities might adapt, recover, and prosper. It positions resilience not as a technical add-on, but as a fundamentally social, ecological, and spatial practice that must be embedded across scales, from materials and buildings to neighbourhoods, infrastructures, and urban systems.The chapters show how climatic threats including heat, flooding, water scarcity, and catastrophic shocks ...

Smart people make a smart city. This volume presents a collection of papers on the concept of smartness, smart development and the international practices in the field. There are five key topic areas: the conceptual, smart economy, smart specialisation, smart city and public governance. The concept of a smart social system is grounded on comparative analysis of competing concepts such as intelligence, knowledge driven, digital, learning, networked, innovative, agile and sustainable.

In a world of growing complexity and dwindling resources, the relationship between technology and sustainability is a pressing issue of concern at the highest levels. This book improves our understanding by examining the ways that people, technology and governance shape each other with implications for sustainability. It is the first book to link technology studies and governance research to this problem.Contributions from leading environmental social scientists are included, with ...