Living sustainably is not just about preserving the wilderness or keeping nature pristine. The transition to a green economy depends on cities. Economic, technological, and cultural forces are moving people out of rural areas and into urban areas. If we are to avert climate catastrophe, we will need our cities to coexist with nature without destroying it. Urbanization holds the key to long-term sustainability, reducing per capita environmental impacts while improving economic prosperity and social inclusion for current and future generations. The Sustainable City provides a broad and engaging overview of the urban systems of the twenty-first century. It approaches urban sustainability from the perspectives of behavioral change, organizational management, and public policy, looking at case studies of existing legislation, programs, and public-private partnerships that strive to align modern urban life and sustainability. The book synthesizes the disparate strands of sustainable city planning in an approachable and applicable guide that highlights how these issues touch our lives on a daily basis, including the transportation we take, the public health systems that protect us, where our energy comes from, and what becomes of our food waste. This second edition of The Sustainable City dives deeper into the financing of sustainable infrastructure and initiatives and puts additional emphasis on the roles that individual citizens and varied stakeholders can play. It also reviews current trends in urban inequality and discusses whether a model of sustainability that embraces a multidimensional approach to development and a multistakeholder approach to decision making can foster social inclusion. It features many more examples and new international case studies spanning the globe.

This book analyses the housing and governance policies of the city of Surakarta, in Indonesia. It addresses the question of whether Surakarta’s strategy for handling the city’s informal sector and marginal settlements shows evidence of sustainability and good governance. The book illustrates current trends in urban development and discussions on effective strategies for improving living conditions in slums on both a global and national scale. Using four main programs as examples, it presents a detailed overview of Surakarta’s housing policies regarding the poor. It critically evaluates the city’s relocation measures and shows that Surakarta’s city government has put into place an effective policy, reaching the poor by inclusive approaches. Influenced by global discussions and best practices, the programs examined are characterized by elements of good governance and Solo’s strategies have already been disseminated to other Indonesian cities. However, the book argues that deficits remain regarding participation and transparency. The work is based on Christian Obermayr's outstanding Master’s thesis, defended in 2013 at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Exploring the latest experiences, achievements and state-of-the-art practices and methodologies in sustainability and the urban environment, this book contains 70 papers presented at the Third International Conference on the Sustainable City. It will be of interest to city planners, architects, environmental engineers and all academics, professionals and practitioners involved in the wide range of disciplines associated with this important and highly topical subject. Strategy and Development; Planning, Development and Management; Environmental Management; Cultural Heritage and Architectural Issues; Land Use and Management; Restructuring and Renewal; Spatial Configuration and Landscaping; Socio-Economic Issues; The Community and the City; Public Safety and Security; Conservation of Resources; Traffic and Transportation; and Urban Waste Management.

Modern cities are facing the growing problem of congestion, poor air quality and lack of public space. To ameliorate the condition of goods transport in cities, sustainable city logistics planning is essential. It requires a collaborative approach among city logistics stakeholders for consolidated goods distribution inside city centers to minimize their negative impacts on city residents and their environment. The book presents theoretical studies, state of the art, and practical applications in the area of sustainable city logistics. It is composed of nine chapters. A brief description of the various chapters is provided as follows: Chapter 1 by Sharfuddin Ahmed Khan and Syed Tahaur Rehman presents a review of literature and future prospects on sustainable city logistics. Globalization, governmental rules, and regulations enforce decision makers and managers to incorporate sustainability in every aspect of their decision making (DM) specifically in city logistics. The area of sustainable city logistics is still in its developing stage and not many authors explore sustainability aspects in city logistics. The focus of this chapter is to review existing literature related to city logistics that considered sustainability in DM. A total of 40 articles that were published between 2010 to 2019 have been considered and categorized in terms of objective of study, area of research focus such as qualitative, quantitative, case study etc., and multi criteria DM methods. Finally, future prospects and directions has been proposed in sustainable city logistics. Chapter 2 by Sättar Ezzati presents challenges and opportunities in maritime logistics empty container repositioning. Maritime logistics and freight transportation are extensive and complex sectors that involve large material resources and represent intricate relationships between trade-off the various decisions and policies affecting different components. Because of the globalization, e-market and high level of customization trends, the sector has faced diversified challenges on different levels of planning including designing, scheduling, fleet sizing, decisions about container ownership, leasing and empty container repositioning, uncertainty and collaboration opportunities that already has provoked advanced coordination and intelligent optimization techniques for its global operations from strategic and tactical perspectives. Large attention of this chapter concentrates on empty containers repositioning problem and potential pathways to address this issue and how container shipping companies can handle this challenge with the help of operations research techniques from the perspectives of shipping business industry. To do so, this chapter presents a comprehensive and systematic literature review mainly focused on recent publications correspond to these logistics that maritime industries are facing. Chapter 3 by Yisha Luo, Ali Alaghbandrad, Tersoo Kelechukwu, and Amin Hammad addresses the theme of smart multi-purpose utility tunnels. In terms of sustainable practices, the conventional method of open cut utility installation has proven to be a short-term solution, considering its negative impact on the environment, and its social disruptive nature. An alternative to open cut utility installation is Multi-purpose Utility Tunnels (MUTs), as it offers an economic, sustainable, and easy to manage and inspect method of utility placement. The risks associated with MUTs are both natural and manmade. As a way of tackling these risks, smart MUTs with the use of sensors will reduce the effects of the risks while supporting the operation and maintenance processes for MUT operators. To enhance decision making, data collected from the sensors are used in the MUT Information Modelling (MUTIM). MUTIM includes the utility tunnel structural model with utilities, equipment, sensors, and devices that can be used for emergency management increasing the sustainability and resilience of smart cities. Chapter 4 by Léonard Ryo Morin, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger, and Martin Trépanier model truck route choices in an urban area using a recursive logit model and GPS data. They explore the use of GPS devices to capture heavy truck routes in the Montreal urban road network. The main focus lies on trips that originate or depart from intermodal terminals (rail yard, port). They descriptively analyse GPS data and use the data to estimate a recursive logit model by means of maximum likelihood. The results show the main factors affecting the route choice decisions. Using this type of predictive models when planning and designing the transport network nearby intermodal terminals could offer opportunities to reduce the negative impacts on truck movements, as the CO2 emissions. Chapter 5 by Akolade Adegoke presents a literature review on benchmarking port sustainability performance. Sustainable development agendas are challenging the world and ports, in particular, to find ways to become more efficient while meeting economic, social and environmental objectives. Although there has been a considerable body of documentation on port green practices and performance in Europe and America, there is limited synthesis about evaluation of sustainable practices in the context of Canadian ports. This chapter provides a review of literature and initiatives employed by global ports authorities and identifies major sustainability performance indicators. Chapter 6 by Silke Hoehl, Kai-Oliver Schocke, and Petra Schaefer presents analysis and recommendations of delivery strategies in urban and suburban areas. A research series about commercial transport started in the region of Frankfurt/Main (Germany) started in 2014. The first project dealt with the commercial transport in the city centre of Frankfurt/Main. One hypothesis was that CEP vehicles are congesting the streets. A data base was built by collecting data in two streets in the centre of Frankfurt. Contrary to the expectation a significant part of commercial transport is caused by vehicles of craftsmen. After that, in 2016 the second project examined the delivery strategies of four CEP companies in Frankfurt. One research question was if CEP companies use different delivery strategies in different parts of the city. Therefore 40 delivery tours were accompanied and data was collected e.g. number of stops, number of parcels per stops, car type, transport situation, parking situation, shift lengths or GPS-track. In parallel, the traffic situation in several districts of Frankfurt were analyzed. In a third part, the two streams were put together to recommend delivery strategies for CEP-companies as well as useful insights for local authorities. As a third project of the research series a new project has just begun. The study area has been extended to the entire RheinMain region. It deals with the commercial transport and faces the challenge to manage commercial transport at a low emission level. On the one hand, the methodologies of the two preceding projects will be applied to a suburban area in the region. Recommendations will be developed. On the other hand, loading zones for electric vehicles in Frankfurt will be identified and developed. After that, a conference will give a wide overview of existing delivery concepts. By pointing out critical situations in the delivery chain, the whole last mile will be described. Chapter 7 by Shuai Ma, Jia Yu, and Ahmet Satir presents a scheme for sequential decision making with a risk-sensitive objective and constraints in a dynamic scenario. A neural network is trained as an approximator of the mapping from parameter space to space of risk and policy with risk-sensitive constraints. For a given risk-sensitive problem, in which the objective and constraints are, or can be estimated by, functions of the mean and variance of return, we generate a synthetic dataset as training data. Parameters defining a targeted process might be dynamic, i.e., they might vary over time, so we sample them within specified intervals to deal with these dynamics. We show that: i). Most risk measures can be estimated with the return variance; ii). By virtue of the state-augmentation transformation, practical problems modeled by Markov decision processes with stochastic rewards can be solved in a risk-sensitive scenario; and iii). The proposed scheme is validated by a numerical experiment. Chapter 8 by J.H.R. van Duin, B. Enserink, J.J. Daleman, and M. Vaandrager addresses the theme of sustainable alternatives selection for parcel delivery. The GHG-emissions of the transport sector are still increasing. This trend is accompanied by the strong growth of the e-commerce sector, leading to more transport movements on our road networks. In order to mitigate the externalities of the e-commerce related parcel delivery market and try to make it more sustainable, the following research question has been drafted: How could the last mile parcel delivery process beco

Cities have experienced an unprecedented rate of growth in the last decade. More than half the world's population lives in urban areas, with the U.S. percentage at 80 percent. Cities have captured more than 80 percent of the globe's economic activity and offered social mobility and economic prosperity to millions by clustering creative, innovative, and educated individuals and organizations. Clustering populations, however, can compound both positive and negative conditions, with many modern urban areas experiencing growing inequality, debility, and environmental degradation. The spread and continued growth of urban areas presents a number of concerns for a sustainable future, particularly if cities cannot adequately address the rise of poverty, hunger, resource consumption, and biodiversity loss in their borders. Intended as a comparative illustration of the types of urban sustainability pathways and subsequent lessons learned existing in urban areas, this study examines specific examples that cut across geographies and scales and that feature a range of urban sustainability challenges and opportunities for collaborative learning across metropolitan regions. It focuses on nine cities across the United States and Canada (Los Angeles, CA, New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, Grand Rapids, MI, Flint, MI, Cedar Rapids, IA, Chattanooga, TN, and Vancouver, Canada), chosen to represent a variety of metropolitan regions, with consideration given to city size, proximity to coastal and other waterways, susceptibility to hazards, primary industry, and several other factors.

The CityForm consortium’s latest book, Dimensions of the Sustainable City, is the first book to report on an empirical multi-disciplinary study specifically designed to address urban sustainability. Drawing together the various dimensions of sustainability – economic, social, transport, energy and ecological – the book examines their relationships both to each other and to urban form. The book investigates the sustainability dimensions of cities through a series of projects based on a common list of elements of urban form, and which draw on the consortium’s latest research to review the sustainability issues of each dimension. The elements of urban form include density, land use, location, accessibility, transport infrastructure and characteristics of the built environment. The book also addresses issues such as adapting cities, psychological and ecological benefits of green space and sustainable lifestyles, each presenting a critical review of the relevant literature followed by an empirical analysis presenting the key results. Based on studies across five UK cities, the book draws out findings of relevance to sustainable cities worldwide. As well as an invaluable reference to researchers in sustainable planning and urban design, the book will provide a useful text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses and for policy makers dealing with these issues. The CityForm consortium is a multi-disciplinary group of researchers from five universities funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council from 2003-07.

How should regional cities develop regional development strategies for their sustainable future? How can such strategies work effectively? Regional cities are now at a crossroads: will they decline or be regenerated under the impacts of globalization? Their sustainable regeneration as creative regional centers will play a decisive role in their sustainable development as a whole, but only with viable regional spatial strategies that strengthen the network of cities and their hinterlands. The concern here lies in urban regeneration and strategic spatial planning at the city-region level. This book records observations of 12 dynamically changing regional cities in Asia, Europe and the United States. The form of the city region, urban regeneration and strategic spatial planning as well as the local and regional governance of each city are examined. Through this empirical and comparative analysis, essential lessons are drawn, which will add a new perspective to discussions on the sustainable future of regional cities in an age of globalization.

A tale of three cities -- The springs of Austin -- The miracle of Curitiba -- The banks of Frankfurt -- Story versus space -- Sustainability and democracy -- Alternative paths to the sustainable city.

This book deals with practical ways to reach a more sustainable state in urban areas through such tools as strategic environmental assessment, sustainability assessment, direction analysis, baseline setting and progress measurement, sustainability targets, and ecological footprint analysis.

This book describes a broad view of sustainability as a crucial factor for the success of its implementation. Not only the environmental aspects of the sustainable cities ́ development are reviewed but the economic and social aspects of it, as highlighted in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 (make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable). Nowadays, researchers, students, and stakeholders are highly involved in sustainability issues. Because of this, they need a guiding document to help them develop and implement sustainability programs at the level of companies and institutions. In this book, the authors discuss and explain basic concepts of sustainability-related to social, economic and environmental aspects, as well as strategies for its implementation.