Urban & Municipal Planning

The issues of urban sustainability are critical, and more so for cities with already high density where the problems of resource constraints, quality of urban community life, and quality of the physical environment are exacerbated by the sheer intensity of social and economic act...ivities within the usually limited confines of metropolitan boundaries. This Guidebook to Urban Sustainability Indicators presents a comprehensive guide for assessing sustainable urban development. It covers thirteen thematic areas pertaining to sustainability of cities and urban areas, which have direct implications on spatial planning and policies, namely Land, Community, Economy, Transport, Biodiversity, Food, Energy, Climate, Air, Water, Waste, Governance and, Culture, and considers how they interlink with one another. The Guidebook aims to advance the knowledge of sustainable urban development and cities through cross-disciplinary thinking and evaluation. It presents sustainability performance indicators for self-assessment and benchmarking cities, and includes both qualitative and quantitative indicators. It draws on a wide range of international databases such as the World Bank's Environmental Performance Indicators to local databases like the Sustainable Seattle Indicators. In total, over 1,100 indicators for sustainable development were studied and feature in the Guidebook. These indicators are organized into sub-themes or dimensions, each representing an area of focus or principle of sustainability. This book is a must read for those who want to have better understanding of the concept of integrated sustainability of urban development from a holistic perspective, rather than approaching sustainability from a single thematic issue. Scholars and students in Urban Planning, Urban Design, and Sustainability Assessment as well as urban professionals, planners and designers, policy makers and municipal authorities will benefit greatly from the diversity and the depth of each theme presen
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"This book is the proceedings of a conference held by the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre to discuss the implications of the Chinese Government's Third Plenum Decision for New Zealand"--Publisher information.

This book is about valuing play and making the space and time for it. It looks at physical spaces and how they can be conducive to play, from early childhood to old age, in homes, neighbourhoods and cities. It shows how to make time for play and how to encourage cultures that are... conducive to play, from individuals to employers and councils.
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Where are we? How did we get here? Where do we go now? A provocative and insightful exploration of rebuilding our homes, communities and cities after their devastation. From nineteenth-century attempts to create Utopias to America's rustbelt, from Darwin's study of worms to China...'s phantom cities, this work ranges widely through history and around the world. It examines the evolution of cities and of Christchurch in particular, looking at its swampy origins and its present reconstruction following the recent destructive earthquakes. And it takes us to L'Aquila in Italy to observe another city shaken by destructive tremors. Farrell writes as a citizen caught up in a devastated city in an era where political ideology has transformed the citizen to 'an asset, the raw material on which . . . empire makes a profit'. In a hundred tiny pieces, she prods at contentious issues, such as the fate of a Cathedral, the closure of schools, the role of insurers, the plans for civic venues. Through personal observation, conversations with friends, a close reading of everything from the daily newspaper to records of other upheavals in Pompeii and Berlin, this dazzling book explores community, the love of place and, ultimately, regeneration and renewal.
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What is it like to grow up in a place where poverty and criminalization lay the roadmap to maturity through trap houses and gangs; where a teenage boy can be shot dead by another teenage boy at a funeral; where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were ...special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description'; and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? In Poor, Caleb Femi - the 'urban romantic' who 'dispel[s] the myths that the greatest English poets are now dead' (Dazed) - combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, hopes and dreams of young Black boys growing up in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls, abandoned houses and gentrifying neighbourhoods that forms their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas to which the South London of his youth was home, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists - foremost among them Giggs - who spoke to and from their lives even as they were living them. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped the poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'
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