Modern cities are increasingly involving citizens in decisions that affect them. This trend is a part of a movement toward a new standard of city management and planning—falling under the names public involvement, public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. City administrators have long focused on attaining excellence in their technical domains; they are now expected to achieve an equal standard of excellence in public involvement. Toward this end, Citizen-Centered Cities provides a body of experience about public involvement that would take years for municipal administrators to accumulate on the job. The opening chapter summarizes nine challenges for public involvement, together with over sixty aspirational recommendations. Subsequent chapters provide detailed case studies illustrating these challenges for a range of projects—a new bridge, a light rail line, a highway interchange, neighborhood street modifications, urban streetscaping, bicycle routes, movement of freight, and a transportation master plan. The close government-academic cooperation required to carry out this project builds on an innovative partnership between the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta called the Center for Public Involvement.

Modern cities are increasingly involving citizens in decisions that affect them. This trend is a part of a movement toward a new standard of city management and planning—falling under the names public involvement, public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. City administrators have long focused on attaining excellence in their technical domains; they are now expected to achieve an equal standard of excellence in public involvement. Toward this end, Citizen-Centered Cities provides a body of experience about public involvement that would take years for municipal administrators to accumulate on the job. The twelve city studies in the present volume were written to provide city administrators with a comparative perspective about how U.S. and Canadian cities carry out their public involvement activities. The opening chapter summarizes general themes and salient differences in approaches to public involvement across twelve cities. The close government–academic cooperation required to carry out this project builds on an innovative partnership between the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta called the Center for Public Involvement.

In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.

The smart city is a driver of change, innovation, competitiveness, and networking for businesses and organizations based on the concept of the Sustainable Development Goals for the 2030 agenda. The importance of a new paradigm regarding the externalities of the environment, citizen welfare, and natural resources in cities as an impact of urban ecosystems is the main objective for sustainable development in cities through 2030. Smart Cities, Citizen Welfare, and the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals provides innovative insights into the key developments and new trends associated with online challenges and opportunities in smart cities based on the concept of the Sustainable Development Goals. The content within this publication represents research encompassing corporate social responsibility, economic policy, and city planning. This book serves as a vital reference source for urban planners, policymakers, managers, entrepreneurs, graduate-level students, researchers, and academicians seeking coverage on topics centered on conceptual, technological, and design issues related to smart city development in Europe.

This book provides a guide to co-designing learning environments and relationships. Learning is fundamental to living and organizing in complex systems. The authors begin by revisiting what learning means in living systems. Their experiences with business organizations and formal education systems have led to the conclusion that learning has been lost from view in many complex systems. The authors briefly trace the history of ideas about learning to give new energy and focus for co-designing learning places. The 12 thematic chapters in this book focus on practical ideas. Each chapter centers on a theme that is explored through a collection of short pieces—presented as ideas, theories, stories, approaches, and methods. This book will benefit a multitude of people and professionals who are interested in new ways to think about learning, both individually and collectively–it was written with a diverse readership in mind.

Cities are without a doubt one of the miracles of human creation and the embodiment of the human environment. Insofar as they are large and densely populated human settlements with defined legal and political boundaries that comprise clusters of buildings, open spaces, public facilities and infrastructure, cities are mainly spaces of services that are exchanged between a wide variety of stakeholders-namely, residents, traders, visitors, and the city authorities. Moreover, the provision of cities' services has profound effect on the local and global sustainability. Thus, municipal services should comprise environmental, social, and economic values, which are designed, produced, and delivered in concert. Over the years, a variety of new urban models and concepts have been designed and proposed as viable means to reestablish the bond between the human and the natural environments, to increase the quality of life within cities and to reduce the impacts that cities have on the social and natural environments (e.g., sustainable city, smart city, or resilient city). Herein, a new model of the service city is presented, including architecture and several pertinent examples, which considers it as a platform that manages and integrates the services and systems currently provided by the city while offering additional supporting services to increase the effectiveness of the value and to achieve the goal of sustainability.

Recent scholarship on institutional entrepreneurship highlights the kinship between for-profit entrepreneurship and the equally transformative innovation and initiative of entrepreneurs in the non-profit, community, and policy-activist fields. This expanded exploration of entrepreneurial potential has become important in the creative destruction—or, more accurately, “creative reclamation”—of abandoned or under-used industrial relics and urban space. This book explores case studies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, where community groups have deployed or are attempting to deploy symbolism and narrative to re-purpose abandoned urban infrastructure into urban public spaces. The author combines interviews, document analysis, site visits, and census tract data to determine how Friends of the Park organizations successfully navigate institutional settings to create public spaces and manage the discourse around these proposed spaces. In-depth descriptions are an essential component of the process. If a certain kind of unsuccessful discourse theme (or successful one) exhibits itself in a large portion of the potential population, it will likely show in this small sample; if the discourse exhibits itself in a very small portion, it very unlikely that it will show. Small samples, in other words, are a wide-mesh net, convenient for catching the big themes.