In the last 100 years global urban populations have expanded from 15 to 50%. Urban growth patterns are changing the face of the earth and the condition of humanity. This atlas addresses these key issues, and analyses the problems of expanding cities.

In the last 100 years, global urban populations have expanded from 15 to 50 per cent. Urban growth patterns are changing the face of the Earth and the condition of humanity. This book addresses these key issues, analyzing the problems of expanding city populations and exploring the possibility of healing cities, making them self-sustaining, responsible for themselves and their immediate surroundings. and the global shift from settlement to city. Part Two explains how a sick city makes for a sick world, and how expanding cities become parasites on their surroundings. Part Three takes a realistic look at people and cities, and how they work together, and identifies ways of healing cities. Finally, the conclusion explains just how close Earth is to her carrying capacity, and why there is a need to act now to prevent a system overload. produced TV documentaries on tropical forests, including Jungle Pharmacy, The Altamira Gathering, and Halting the Fires.

Urban and natural environments are often viewed as entirely separate entities — human settlements as the domain of architects and planners, and natural areas as untouched wilderness. This dichotomy continues to drive decision-making in subtle ways, but with the mounting pressures of global climate change and declining biodiversity, it is no longer viable. New technologies are promising to provide renewable energy sources and greener designs, but real change will require a deeper shift in values, attitudes, and perceptions. A timely and important collection, The Natural City explores how to integrate the natural environment into healthy urban centres from philosophical, religious, socio-political, and planning perspectives. Recognizing the need to better link the humanities with public policy, The Natural City offers unique insights for the development of an alternative vision of urban life.

Abstract: This paper provides the key elements to develop an integrated approach for measuring and monitoring city performance globally. The paper reviews the role of cities and why indicators are important. Then it discusses past approaches to city indicators and the systems developed to date, including the World Bank's initiatives. After identifying the strengths and weaknesses of past experiences, it discusses the characteristics of optimal indicators. The paper concludes with a proposed plan to develop standardized indicators that emphasize the importance of indicators that are measurable, replicable, potentially predictive, and most important, consistent and comparable over time and across cities. As an innovative characteristic, the paper includes subjective measures in city indicators, such as well-being, happy citizens, and trust.

The Creative City is a clarion call for imaginative action in developing and running urban life. It shows how to think, plan and act creatively in addressing urban issues, with remarkable examples of innovation and regeneration from around the world. This revised edition of Charles Landry's highly influential text has been updated with a new, extensive overview.

This book is part of a series produced in association with the Open University and forms part of the Open University course DD304: Understanding cities.

provides forum for progressing the urban debate demonstrates good design and practice through a variety of case studies offers cross-disciplinary view points

Three quarters of the world's population will be living in cities by the year 2025. The author argues that unless cities are transformed, the environment and people's rights will never be properly respected.

Contemporary urbanisation has two faces: global flows of people, money and information, and that of localised social and economic disparities. Recent research has focused on the headlines of global cities as control centres of the world economy, and social and economic shock waves that have raged through cities and regions, but less attention has been paid to the secret life of cities, and the changing nature of everyday life in the wake of such changes.This book challenges current research and policy agendas recommending spatial concentration and relocation as a solution to the problems of environmental sustainability and social dislocation. Instead, this book highlights the key linkages between social and environmental problems, it argues that neither are likely to be resolved with a simple spatial fix. The book draws attention to local contexts of contemporary urbanisation emphasising consideration of policy making from the perspective of the household as a key unit of analysis in identifying links between labour and housing markets, transport and leisure.This book draws upon detailed household interviews about the daily experience of life in a global city. It illustrates the dilemmas and solutions that people routinely find in order to go on in their lives. It shows that these local fixes that are managed at the level of the household work in spite of, and sometimes against, existing policies aimed at sustainability. It concludes that policy making needs to be radically overhauled in order to address the integrated nature of people's everyday lives.

Modern cities can be designed to constitute a more supportive environment for a great many activities, provide a more livable habitat, and reduce the burden imposed on the biosphere. They can be made healthier (in terms of the definition by World Health Organization) and more sustainable by means of new and emerging preventive approaches. Healthy Cities focuses on those preventive approaches that can make cities healthier and more sustainable. This book, as well as the two companion volumes, Sustainable Energy and Sustainable Production, is the result of a twelve-year research project carried out at the Center for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto. The research findings led to the development of a new conceptual framework and strategy aimed at converting technological and economic growth into development that would gradually become more sustainable.