This ground breaking volume raises radical critiques and proposes innovative solutions for social sustainability in the built environment. Urban Social Sustainability provides an in-depth insight into the discourse and argues that every urban intervention has a social sustainability dimension that needs to be taken into consideration, and incorporated into a comprehensive and cohesive ‘urban agenda’ that is built on three principles of recognition, integration, and monitoring. This should be achieved through a dialogical and reflexive process of decision-making. To achieve sustainable communities, social sustainability should form the basis of a constructive dialogue and be interlinked with other areas of sustainable development. This book underlines the urgency of approaching social sustainability as an urban agenda and goes on to make suggestions about its formulation. Urban Social Sustainability consists of original contributions from academics and experts within the field and explores the significance of social sustainability from different perspectives. Areas covered include urban policy, transportation and mobility, urban space and architectural form, housing, urban heritage, neighbourhood development, and urban governance. Drawing on case studies from a number of countries and world regions the book presents a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding from social sustainability in urban settings, and provides practitioners and policy makers with innovative recommendations to achieve more socially sustainable urban environment.

This groundbreaking new volume on social sustainability offers both critique and creative solutions. It challenges the conventional wisdoms of social sustainability and presents practical examples of projects that will help practitioners to think carefully and innovatively about the situations they are addressing.The book consists of original contributions from academics working in the fields of urban planning, housing, regeneration, transport and international sustainable development. Drawing on case study research gathered in the UK, Europe and Africa, it adopts an original, interdisciplinar.

This book has been prepared to embody the major and efficient applications of the different duties and the role of sustainability in urban planning and design, by a new reading of the city structure and composition, as well as offering a solid and clear concept for this kind of science. The book aims to illustrate various theories and methods of the treatment of the modern ideas of metropolitan life. The book is divided into two parts and contains 23 chapters.

Urban communities around the world face increased stress from natural disasters linked to climate change, and other urban pressures. They need to grow rapidly stronger in order to cope, adapt and flourish. Strong social networks and social cohesion can be more important for a community’s resilience than the actual physical structures of a city. But how can urban planning and design support these critical collective social strengths? This book offers blue sky thinking from the applied social and behavioural sciences, and urban planning. It looks at case studies from 14 countries around the world – including India, the USA, South Africa, Indonesia, the UK and New Zealand – focusing on initiatives for housing, public space and transport stops, and also natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes. Building on these insights, the authors propose a 'gold standard': a socially aware planning process and policy recommendation for those drawing up city sustainability and climate change resilience strategies, and urban developers looking to build climate-proof infrastructure and spaces. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of urban studies, resilience studies and climate change policy, as well as policymakers and practitioners working in related fields.

Urban regeneration is a key focus for public policy throughout Europe. This book examines social sustainability and analyses its meaning. The authors offer a comprehensive European perspective to identify best practices in sustainable urban regeneration in five major cities in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. This authoritative overview of the scholarly literature makes the book essential reading for researchers and post-graduate students in sustainable development, real estate, geography, urban studies, and urban planning, as well as consultants and policy advisors in urban regeneration and the built environment.

Cities are a locus of human diversity, where people with varying degrees of wealth and status share an association within a particular urban boundary. Despite the common geography, sharp social divisions characterize many cities. High levels of urban violence bear witness to the difficult challenge of creating socially cohesive and inclusive cities. The devastated inner cities of many large American urban centres exemplify the failure of urban development. With an enlightened democratic approach to policy reform, however, cities can achieve social sustainability. Some cities have been more successful than others in creating environments conducive to the cohabitation of a diverse population. In this collection of original essays, case studies of ten cities (Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Miami and Baltimore in the United States, Geneva and Rotterdam in Europe, S-o Paulo and San Salvador in South America, and Nairobi and Cape Town in South Africa) are presented and analysed in terms of social sustainability. The volume as a whole looks at the policies, institutions, and planning and social processes that can have the effect of integrating diverse groups and cultural practices in a just and equitable fashion. The authors conclude that policies conducive to social sustainability should, among other things, seek to promote fiscal equalization, weave communities within the metropolis into a cohesive whole, and ideally, provide transport systems that ensure equal access to public services and workplaces, all within the framework of an open and democratic local governance structure.

Cities are home to the most consequential current attempts at human adaptation and they provide one possible focus for the flourishing of life on this planet. However, for this to be realized in more than an ad hoc way, a substantial rethinking of current approaches and practices needs to occur. Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice responds to the crises of sustainability in the world today by going back to basics. It makes four major contributions to thinking about and acting upon cities. It provides a means of reflexivity learning about urban sustainability in the process of working practically for positive social development and projected change. It challenges the usually taken-for-granted nature of sustainability practices while providing tools for modifying those practices. It emphasizes the necessity of a holistic and integrated understanding of urban life. Finally it rewrites existing dominant understandings of the social whole such as the triple-bottom line approach that reduce environmental questions to externalities and social questions to background issues. The book is a much-needed practical and conceptual guide for rethinking urban engagement. Covering the full range of sustainability domains and bridging discourses aimed at academics and practitioners, this is an essential read for all those studying, researching and working in urban geography, sustainability assessment, urban planning, urban sociology and politics, sustainable development and environmental studies.