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.

This report looks at progress made in “growing greener cities” in Latin America and the Caribbean – cities in which urban and peri-urban agriculture is recognized by public policy, included in urban development strategies and land-use planning, supported by agricultural research and extension, and linked to sources of technological innovation, investment and credit, and to urban markets and consumers.

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.

Urban agriculture offers promising solutions to many different urban problems, such as blighted vacant lots, food insecurity, storm water runoff, and unemployment. These objectives connect to many cities' broader goal of "sustainability," but tensions among stakeholders have started to emerge in cities as urban agriculture is incorporated into the policymaking framework. Growing a Sustainable City? offers a critical analysis of the development of urban agriculture policies and their role in making post-industrial cities more sustainable. Christina Rosan and Hamil Pearsall's intriguing and illuminating case study of Philadelphia reveals how growing in the city has become a symbol of urban economic revitalization, sustainability, and - increasingly - gentrification. Their comprehensive research includes interviews with urban farmers, gardeners, and city officials, and reveals that the transition to "sustainability" is marked by a series of tensions along race, class, and generational lines. The book evaluates the role of urban agriculture in sustainability planning and policy by placing it within the context of a large city struggling to manage competing sustainability objectives. They highlight the challenges and opportunities of institutionalizing urban agriculture into formal city policy. Rosan and Pearsall tell the story of change and growing pains as a city attempts to reinvent itself as sustainable, livable, and economically competitive.

Growing Greener is an illustrated workbook that presents a new look at designing subdivisions while preserving green space and creating open space networks. Randall Arendt explains how to design residential developments that maximize land conservation without reducing overall building density, thus avoiding the political and legal problems often associated with "down-zoning." The author offers a three-pronged strategy for shaping growth around a community's special natural and cultural features, demonstrating ways of establishing or modifying the municipal comprehensive plan, zoning ordinance, and subdivision ordinance to include a strong conservation focus. Open space protection becomes the central organizing principle for new residential development, and the open space that is protected is laid out to form an interconnected system of protected lands running across a community. The book offers: detailed information on how to conduct a community resource inventory a four-step approach to designing conservation subdivisions extensive model language for comprehensive plans, subdivision ordinances, and zoning ordinances illustrated design principles for hamlets, villages, and traditional small town neighborhoods In addition, Growing Greener includes eleven case studies of actual conservation developments in nine states, and two exercises suitable for group participation. Case studies include: Ringfield, Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania; The Fields of St. Croix, City of Lake Elmo, Minnesota; Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, Illinois; The Meadows at Dolly Gordon Brook, York, Maine; Farmcolony, Standsville, Virginia; The Ranch at Roaring Fork, Carbondale, Colorado; and others. Growing Greener builds upon and expands the basic ideas presented in Arendt's earlier work Conservation Design for Subdivisions, broadening the scope to include more detailed sections on the comprehensive planning process and information on how zoning ordinances can be updated to incorporate the concept of conservation design. It is the first practical publication to explain in detail how resource-conserving development techniques can be put into practice by municipal officials, residential developers, and site designers, and it offers a simple and straightforward approach to balancing opportunities for developers and conservationists.

The Second Global Plan of Action addresses new challenges, such as climate change and food insecurity, as well as novel opportunities, including information, communication and molecular methodologies. It contains 18 priority activities organized in four main groups: In situ conservation and management; Ex situ conservation; Sustainable use; and Building sustainable institutional and human capacities.

The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 cities in Europe and North America over a 20-year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries and on the analysis of core planning, policy and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies. The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening are not only physical but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning—a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities that prioritize equity in green access, in secure housing and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.

In our peak oil, post-Katrina world, how do America's largest cities stack up in terms of sustainability? Which cities are more self-sufficient and better-prepared for our uncertain future, and which cities are operating business-as-usual? How Green is Your City? examines the outcome of a sustainability study of the 50 largest U.S. cities, compiled by SustainLane. The 2006 SustainLane US Cities Rankings employed 15 standards to measure each city's performance and ranked them overall according to the cumulative results. Among those standards: Public transit use Air and tap water quality Planning/land use City innovation Affordability Energy/climate change policy Local food/agriculture Green economy Sustainability management Leading the pack is Portland, Oregon, with its high quality of life and commitment to green building, local food, alternative fuels and renewable energy, while Columbus, Ohio, with its dependence on the automobile and poor public transit, ranks at the bottom. How Green is Your City? offers an in-depth analysis of each city's management policies, strengths and challenges, as well as the emerging job and tax base expansion opportunities with the growth of clean technologies. How Green is Your City? will appeal to city planners, legislators, green businesses, as well as anyone interested in their quality of life and making their city a more sustainable place. SustainLane.us was designed as an online open-source knowledge base devoted to government officials, while Sustainlane.com is for reviews in the green and healthy product market. Author Warren Karlenzig, along with Frank Marquardt, Paula White, Rachel Yaseen and Richard Young of SustainLane.com contributed to this project.

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.

St. Petersburg, Florida, has become virtually synonymous with retirement and old age. The city of green benches once courted its elderly population; now, however, it seeks to rejuvenate its image, to attract the young through urban revitalization. In this humane and sensitive book, Maria Vesperi, an anthropologist and journalist, looks at the realities of being old and poor in the rapidly changing downtown of St. Petersburg. Vesperi provides a complete and carefully observed picture of the elderly: the conditions of their_ lives, representative social programs created to provide for them, and their interaction with the city around them. The life of the old in St. Petersburg, she notes, is characterized by a profound contradiction between how the elderly see themselves and how they are viewed by the community-a contradiction that speaks of the way cultural stereotypes about aging are transmitted to all older Americans. As a culture, Vesperi maintains, we view the old as an isolated segment of humanity without a living future or even an ongoing present. She seeks to understand the ways in which the old respond to the distorted image that they meet with every day, not only in their relations with individuals but in their dealings with the institutions set up specifically to care for them. Her study of St. Petersburg explores questions that are significant throughout the United States: How did our rigid cultural assumptions about old age develop, and how can we change them? Why do so many gerontologists, public officials, and social workers tacitly subscribe to that misconception? How does it inform the development and operation of public programs for the elderly? Enlivened by the voices of the old people of St. Petersburg and enriched with photographs by Ricardo Ferro, this moving book is important reading for anyone concerned with the life of the elderly in America.