As towns and cities worldwide deal with fast-increasing land pressures, while also trying to promote more sustainable, connected communities, the creation of green spaces within urban areas is receiving greater attention than ever before. At the same time, the value of the 'green belt' as the most prominent model of green space planning is being widely questioned, and an array of alternative models are being proposed. This book explores one of those alternative models – the 'green wedge', showing how this offers a successful model for integrating urban development and nature in existing and new towns and cities around the world. Green wedges, considered here as ducts of green space running from the countryside into the centre of a city or town, are not only making a comeback in urban planning, but they have a deeper history in the twentieth century than many expect – a history that provides valuable insight and lessons in the employment of networked green spaces in city design and regional planning today. Part history, and part contemporary argument, this book first examines the emergence and global diffusion of the green wedge in town planning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, placing it in the broader historic context of debates and ideas for urban planning with nature, before going on to explore its use in contemporary urban practice. Examining their relation to green infrastructures, landscape ecology and landscape urbanism and their potential for sustainable cities, it highlights the continued relevance of a historic idea in an era of rapid climate change.

As towns and cities worldwide deal with fast-increasing land pressures, while also trying to promote more sustainable, connected communities, the creation of green spaces within urban areas is receiving greater attention than ever before. At the same time, the value of the 'green belt' as the most prominent model of green space planning is being widely questioned, and an array of alternative models are being proposed. This book explores one of those alternative models – the 'green wedge', showing how this offers a successful model for integrating urban development and nature in existing and new towns and cities around the world. Green wedges, considered here as ducts of green space running from the countryside into the centre of a city or town, are not only making a comeback in urban planning, but they have a deeper history in the twentieth century than many expect – a history that provides valuable insight and lessons in the employment of networked green spaces in city design and regional planning today. Part history, and part contemporary argument, this book first examines the emergence and global diffusion of the green wedge in town planning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, placing it in the broader historic context of debates and ideas for urban planning with nature, before going on to explore its use in contemporary urban practice. Examining their relation to green infrastructures, landscape ecology and landscape urbanism and their potential for sustainable cities, it highlights the continued relevance of a historic idea in an era of rapid climate change.

As the need to confront unplanned growth increases, planners, policymakers, and citizens are scrambling for practical tools and examples of successful and workable approaches. Growth management initiatives are underway in the U.S. at all levels, but many American "success stories" provide only one piece of the puzzle. To find examples of a holistic approach to dealing with sprawl, one must turn to models outside of the United States. In Green Urbanism, Timothy Beatley explains what planners and local officials in the United States can learn from the sustainable city movement in Europe. The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands. Chapters examine: the sustainable cities movement in Europe examples and ideas of different housing and living options transit systems and policies for promoting transit use, increasing bicycle use, and minimizing the role of the automobile creative ways of incorporating greenness into cities ways of readjusting "urban metabolism" so that waste flows become circular programs to promote more sustainable forms of economic development sustainable building and sustainable design measures and features renewable energy initiatives and local efforts to promote solar energy ways of greening the many decisions of local government including ecological budgeting, green accounting, and other city management tools. Throughout, Beatley focuses on the key lessons from these cities -- including Vienna, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin -- and what their experience can teach us about effectively and creatively promoting sustainable development in the United States. Green Urbanism is the first full-length book to describe urban sustainability in European cities, and provides concrete examples and detailed discussions of innovative and practical sustainable planning ideas. It will be a useful reference and source of ideas for urban and regional planners, state and local officials, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and anyone concerned with how cities can become more livable.

The Urban Forest in the Age of Urbanization seeks to reflect on the connotation of urban forestry in line with related emergent holistic theories. Today, much of the planet is urbanised and planners debate “Planetary Urbanization”, economists discuss “The Global City”, ecologists describe the planet’s biodiversity hotspots, and climate scientists warn of a “global” crisis. We might think therefore that focusing on forestation approaches at the Urban and peri-urban “edge”, might be reductionist. However, if the city is everywhere, and everything is a city, if the urbanised world now is a chain of metropolitan areas connected by places and corridors of communication, then what is not urban? And above all, which forests are not urban forests?Starting from the dualism between city and forest and its evolution towards holism, the book seeks to create a framework of dialectical approaches. The case studies included analyse a wide range of urbanisation “processes” to review the practical approaches of urban forestry, in line with the global crisis of the era of globalisation, when climate change, population growth, implosions and explosions of urbanisation, lack of arable land and food are unavoidable.

This book explores novel theories, strategies and methods for re-naturing cities. It enables readers to learn from best practice and advances the current theoretical and empirical understanding in the field. The book also offers valuable insights into how planners and policymakers can apply this knowledge to their own cities and regions, exploring top-down, bottom-up and mixed mechanisms for the systemic re-naturing of planned and existing cities. There is considerable interest in ‘naturalising’ cities, since it can help address multiple global societal challenges and generate various benefits, such as the enhancement of health and well-being, sustainable urbanisation, ecosystems and their services, and resilience to climate change. This can also translate into tangible economic benefits in terms of preventing health hazards, positively affecting health-related expenditure, new job opportunities (i.e. urban farming) and the regeneration of urban areas. There is, thus, a compelling case to investigate integrative approaches to urban and natural systems that can help cities address the social, economic and environmental needs of a growing population. How can we plan with nature? What are the models and approaches that can be used to develop more sustainable cities that provide high-quality urban green spaces?

This book explores how lessons from past urban planning experiences can inform current debates on urban agriculture. Productive landscapes today have been posited as instruments for the positive transformation related to territorial fragility and abandonment, promoting social cohesion, food security and wider environmental and economic benefits. The book will re-map the way in which seeming landscape limitations and challenges can be turned into potential, innovation and a new lease of urban-rural life. It does so by drawing on significant past urban agricultural experiences in planning as vectors for new critical reflections relevant to re-igniting ideas for future envisioning of urban scenarios in which productive landscapes play fundamental transformative roles. The focus is on planning ideas and the roles of key individual planners, all of which have designed agricultural strategies for the city at some point in their careers. It intends to help us today reimagine urban-rural relationships, and the transformation of under or mis-used urban open spaces, peri-urban areas, fringe conditions and in-between spaces.

Annotation The world is in the midst of an ecological explosion with devastating implications. Thousands of species of microbes, plants, and animals are being introduced, both deliberately and inadvertently, to new land areas, seas, and freshwaters. In many regions, these new colonists are running wild, disrupting the dynamics of ecosystems, pushing native species toward extinction, and causing billions of dollars in direct economic damages. Alien Species in North America and Hawaii provides a comprehensive overview of the invasive species phenomenon, examining the threats posed and the damage that has already been done to ecosystems across North America and Hawaii. George W. Cox considers both the biological theory underlying invasions and the potential and actual effects on ecosystems and human activities. His book offers a framework for understanding the problem and provides a detailed examination of species and regions. Specific chapters examine: North American invaders and their threats how exotic species are dispersed to new regions how physical and biotic features influence the establishment and spread of invasives patterns of exotic invasions, with separate chapters covering each of the ten most seriously invaded regions and ecosystems patterns of invasiveness exhibited by major groups of exotics the theory of invasive capability of alien species and the resistance of communities to invasion theoretical aspects of ecosystem impacts of invaders and the evolutionary interaction of invaders and natives management and public policy issues Alien Species in North America and Hawaii offers for the first time an assessment and synthesis of the problem of invasive species in North American and Hawaiian ecosystems. Scientists, conservation professionals, policymakers, and anyone involved with the study and control of invasive species will find the book an essential guideand reference to one of the most serious and widespread threats to global biodiversity.