Delta Urbanism is a major new initiative that explores the growth, development, and management of deltaic cities and regions, with the aim of balancing various goals in a sustainable manner: urbanization, port commerce, industrial development, flood defense, public safety, ecological balance, tourism, and recreation. This book is a detailed history and overview of how one low-lying country has developed the policies, tools, technology, planning, public outreach, and international cooperation needed to save their populated deltas.

This volume of APA's Delta Urbanism series traces the development of New Orleans from precolonial times to post-Katrina realities, in the context of the deltaic plain on which it lies. The book describes the underlying physical terrain and covers the various transformations humans have made to it: site selection, settlement, urbanization, population, expansion, drainage, protection, exploitation, devastation, and recovery. What New Orleans has experienced foretells what similar cities will be tackling in years to come.

This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments. Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city’s ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another’s spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

Adaptation Urbanism and Resilient Communities outlines and explains adaptation urbanism as a theoretical framework for understanding and evaluating resilience projects in cities and relates it to pressing contemporary policy issues related to urban climate change mitigation and adaptation. Through a series of detailed case studies, this book uncovers the promise and tensions of a new wave of resilient communities in Europe (Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and London), and the United States (New Orleans and South Florida). In addition, best practice projects in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Delft, Utrecht, and Vancouver are examined. The authors highlight how these communities are reinventing the role of streets and connecting public spaces in adapting to and mitigating climate change through green/blue infrastructure planning, maintaining and enhancing sustainable transportation options, and struggling to ensure equitable development for all residents. The case studies demonstrate that while there are some more universal aspects to encouraging adaptation urbanism, there are also important local characteristics that need to be both acknowledged and celebrated to help local communities thrive in the era of climate change. The book also provides key policy lessons and a roadmap for future research in adaptation urbanism. Advancing resilience policy discourse through multidisciplinary framework this work will be of great interest to students of urban planning, geography, transportation, landscape architecture, and environmental studies, as well as resilience practitioners around the world.

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing. Contributors Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker

The New Companion to Urban Design continues the assemblage of rich and critical ideas about urban form and design that began with the Companion to Urban Design (Routledge, 2011). With chapters from a new set of contributors, this sequel offers a more comparative perspective representing multiple voices and perspectives from the Global South. The essays in this volume are organized in three parts: Part I: Comparative Urbanism; Part II: Challenges; and Part III: Opportunities. Each part contains distinct sections designed to address specific themes, and includes a list of annotated suggested further readings at the end of each chapter. Part I: Comparative Urbanism examines different variants of urbanism in the Global North and the Global South, produced by a new economic order characterized by the mobility of labor, capital, information, and technology. Part II: Challenges discusses some of the contemporary challenges that cities of the Global North and the Global South are facing and the possible role of urban design. This part discusses spatial claims and conflicts, challenges generated by urban informality, explosive growth or dramatic shrinkage of the urban settlement, gentrification and displacement, and mimesis, simulacra and lack of authenticity. Part III: Aspirations discusses some normative goals that urban design interventions aspire to bring about in cities of the Global North and the Global South. These include resilience and sustainability, health, conservation/restoration, justice, intelligence, access and mobility, and arts and culture. The New Companion to Urban Design is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students interested in cities and their built environment. It offers an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across a range of disciplines including urban design, planning, urban studies, and geography.

Urban areas have been caught up in a turbulent process of transformation over the past 50 years and changes have been rapid, with issues such as mobility, nature, water management, energy use and public space featuring prominently._x000D_ In each Olympic year since 1988, the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology has held an international conference focusing on the connection between research and design, exploring the field of tension between science, technology and art._x000D_ This book presents the proceedings of the latest in this series of conferences: New Urban Configurations, held in Delft, the Netherlands, in October 2012 in collaboration with the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) and the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF). This edition of the conference discussed the role and critical potential of the architectural project in the transformation process of cities and territories that leads to new urban configurations._x000D_ The publication contains all 140 accepted papers and a selection of the keynote lectures presented at the conference. The papers have been grouped into five main themes: innovation in building typology; infrastructure and the city; complex urban projects; green spaces, and delta urbanism. Four of these major topics are further divided into several subtopics._x000D_ This book will be of interest to everyone involved in designing, building, thinking about as well as managing the urban landscape and territory.