Greening Cities, Growing Communities

Greening Cities, Growing Communities PDF Author: Jeffrey Hou
Publisher: Land and Community Design Case
ISBN: 9780295989280
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Although there are thousands of community gardens all across North America, only a few cities, such as Seattle, include them in their urban planning process. This book reports on the making of Seattles community gardens and the multiple roles they play in the citys life. It touches on such issues as planning and design strategies; stewardship; community, professional, and government participation; and programs built around the gardens, especially those aimed at low-income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors. It will appeal to a broad audience of professionals, educators, community organizers, citizens, and policy makers interested in improving the quality of life in their own communities.

Greening Cities, Growing Communities

Greening Cities, Growing Communities PDF Author: Jeffrey Hou
Publisher: Land and Community Design Case
ISBN: 9780295989280
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although there are thousands of community gardens all across North America, only a few cities, such as Seattle, include them in their urban planning process. This book reports on the making of Seattles community gardens and the multiple roles they play in the citys life. It touches on such issues as planning and design strategies; stewardship; community, professional, and government participation; and programs built around the gardens, especially those aimed at low-income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors. It will appeal to a broad audience of professionals, educators, community organizers, citizens, and policy makers interested in improving the quality of life in their own communities.

Growing Greener Cities

Growing Greener Cities PDF Author: Eugenie L. Birch
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204093
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted described his most famous project, the design of New York's Central Park, as "a democratic development of highest significance." Over the years, the significance of green in civic life has grown. In twenty-first-century America, not only open space but also other issues of sustainability—such as potable water and carbon footprints—have become crucial elements in the quality of life in the city and surrounding environment. Confronted by a U.S. population that is more than 70 percent urban, growing concern about global warming, rising energy prices, and unabated globalization, today's decision makers must find ways to bring urban life into balance with the Earth in order to sustain the natural, economic, and political environment of the modern city. In Growing Greener Cities, a collection of essays on urban sustainability and environmental issues edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, scholars and practitioners alike promote activities that recognize and conserve nature's ability to sustain urban life. These essays demonstrate how partnerships across professional organizations, businesses, advocacy groups, governments, and individuals themselves can bring green solutions to cities from London to Seattle. Beyond park and recreational spaces, initiatives that fall under the green umbrella range from public transit and infrastructure improvement to aquifer protection and urban agriculture. Growing Greener Cities offers an overview of the urban green movement, case studies in effective policy implementation, and tools for measuring and managing success. Thoroughly illustrated with color graphs, maps, and photographs, Growing Greener Cities provides a panoramic view of urban sustainability and environmental issues for green-minded city planners, policy makers, and citizens.

Greening Cities

Greening Cities PDF Author: Puay Yok Tan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 981104113X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This book offers an overview of recent scientific and professional literature on urban greening and urban ecology, focusing on diverse disciplines such as landscape architecture, geography, urban ecology, urban climatology, biodiversity conservation, urban governance, architecture and urban hydrology. It includes contributions in which academics, public policy experts and practitioners share their considerable knowledge on the multi-faceted aspects of greening cities. The greening of cities has witnessed a global resurgence over the past two decades and has made a significant contribution to urban liveability and sustainability, as well as increasing resilience. As urban greening efforts continue to expand, it is useful to promote recent advances in our understanding of various aspects of planning, design and management of urban greenery, but at the same time, it is also important to realize that there are important gaps in our knowledge and that further research is needed. The book is organized in three main parts: concepts, functions and forms of urban greening. The first part examines the historical roots of greening cities and how the burgeoning field of urban ecology can contribute useful principles and strategies to guide the planning, design and management of urban greening. The second part shifts the focus to the diverse range of services – the functions – provided by urban greening, such as those related to urban climate, urban biodiversity, human health, and community building. The final part explores conventional, often neglected, but important forms of urban greenery such as urban woodlands and urban farms, as well as relatively recent forms of urban greenery like those integrated with buildings and waterways. It offers a ready reference resource for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to grasp the critical issues and trigger further studies and applications in the quest for high-performance green cities.

Cities Farming for the Future

Cities Farming for the Future PDF Author: International Development Research Centre (Canada)
Publisher: IDRC
ISBN: 1552502163
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description


The Permaculture City

The Permaculture City PDF Author: Toby Hemenway
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585273
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Permaculture is more than just the latest buzzword; it offers positive solutions for many of the environmental and social challenges confronting us. And nowhere are those remedies more needed and desired than in our cities. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that works so beautifully for growing food—connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways—applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design, illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs. The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we’re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways. Readers will find new information on designing the urban home garden and strategies for gardening in community, rethinking our water and energy systems, learning the difference between a “job” and a “livelihood,” and the importance of placemaking and an empowered community. This important book documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practitioners. Understanding nature can do more than improve how we grow, make, or consume things; it can also teach us how to cooperate, make decisions, and arrive at good solutions.

Green Urbanism

Green Urbanism PDF Author: Timothy Beatley
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610910133
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
As the need to confront unplanned growth increases, planners, policymakers, and citizens are scrambling for practical tools and examples of successful and workable approaches. Growth management initiatives are underway in the U.S. at all levels, but many American "success stories" provide only one piece of the puzzle. To find examples of a holistic approach to dealing with sprawl, one must turn to models outside of the United States. In Green Urbanism, Timothy Beatley explains what planners and local officials in the United States can learn from the sustainable city movement in Europe. The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands. Chapters examine: the sustainable cities movement in Europe examples and ideas of different housing and living options transit systems and policies for promoting transit use, increasing bicycle use, and minimizing the role of the automobile creative ways of incorporating greenness into cities ways of readjusting "urban metabolism" so that waste flows become circular programs to promote more sustainable forms of economic development sustainable building and sustainable design measures and features renewable energy initiatives and local efforts to promote solar energy ways of greening the many decisions of local government including ecological budgeting, green accounting, and other city management tools. Throughout, Beatley focuses on the key lessons from these cities -- including Vienna, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin -- and what their experience can teach us about effectively and creatively promoting sustainable development in the United States. Green Urbanism is the first full-length book to describe urban sustainability in European cities, and provides concrete examples and detailed discussions of innovative and practical sustainable planning ideas. It will be a useful reference and source of ideas for urban and regional planners, state and local officials, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and anyone concerned with how cities can become more livable.

Urban Green

Urban Green PDF Author: Peter Harnik
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597268127
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
For years American urban parks fell into decay due to disinvestment, but as cities began to rebound—and evidence of the economic, cultural, and health benefits of parks grew— investment in urban parks swelled. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands. Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks. The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.

Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems

Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems PDF Author: Peter Newman
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597267473
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Modern city dwellers are largely detached from the environmental effects of their daily lives. The sources of the water they drink, the food they eat, and the energy they consume are all but invisible, often coming from other continents, and their waste ends up in places beyond their city boundaries. Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems shows how cities and their residents can begin to reintegrate into their bioregional environment, and how cities themselves can be planned with nature’s organizing principles in mind. Taking cues from living systems for sustainability strategies, Newman and Jennings reassess urban design by exploring flows of energy, materials, and information, along with the interactions between human and non-human parts of the system. Drawing on examples from all corners of the world, the authors explore natural patterns and processes that cities can emulate in order to move toward sustainability. Some cities have adopted simple strategies such as harvesting rainwater, greening roofs, and producing renewable energy. Others have created biodiversity parks for endangered species, community gardens that support a connection to their foodshed, and pedestrian-friendly spaces that encourage walking and cycling. A powerful model for urban redevelopment, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems describes aspects of urban ecosystems from the visioning process to achieving economic security to fostering a sense of place.

Green Infrastructure

Green Infrastructure PDF Author: Mark A. Benedict
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597267643
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
With illustrative and detailed examples drawn from throughout the country, Green Infrastructure advances smart land conservation: large scale thinking and integrated action to plan, protect and manage our natural and restored lands. From the individual parcel to the multi-state region, Green Infrastructure helps each of us look at the landscape in relation to the many uses it could serve, for nature and people, and determine which use makes the most sense. In this wide-ranging primer, leading experts in the field provide a detailed how-to for planners, designers, landscape architects, and citizen activists.

Biophilic Cities

Biophilic Cities PDF Author: Timothy Beatley
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597267155
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the "greening" of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And any vision of a sustainable urban future must place its focus squarely on nature, on the presence, conservation, and celebration of the actual green features and natural life forms. A biophilic city is more than simply a biodiverse city, says Beatley. It is a place that learns from nature and emulates natural systems, incorporates natural forms and images into its buildings and cityscapes, and designs and plans in conjunction with nature. A biophilic city cherishes the natural features that already exist but also works to restore and repair what has been lost or degraded. In Biophilic Cities Beatley not only outlines the essential elements of a biophilic city, but provides examples and stories about cities that have successfully integrated biophilic elements--from the building to the regional level--around the world. From urban ecological networks and connected systems of urban greenspace, to green rooftops and green walls and sidewalk gardens, Beatley reviews the emerging practice of biophilic urban design and planning, and tells many compelling stories of individuals and groups working hard to transform cities from grey and lifeless to green and biodiverse.