Urban Green

Urban Green
Author: Peter Harnik
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2012-07-16
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1597268127

For years American urban parks fell into decay due to disinvestment, but as cities began to rebound—and evidence of the economic, cultural, and health benefits of parks grew— investment in urban parks swelled. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands. Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks. The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.

Urban Green

Urban Green
Author: Colin Fisher
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015-05-11
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1469619962

In early twentieth-century America, affluent city-dwellers made a habit of venturing out of doors and vacationing in resorts and national parks. Yet the rich and the privileged were not the only ones who sought respite in nature. In this pathbreaking book, historian Colin Fisher demonstrates that working-class white immigrants and African Americans in rapidly industrializing Chicago also fled the urban environment during their scarce leisure time. If they had the means, they traveled to wilderness parks just past the city limits as well as to rural resorts in Wisconsin and Michigan. But lacking time and money, they most often sought out nature within the city itself--at urban parks and commercial groves, along the Lake Michigan shore, even in vacant lots. Chicagoans enjoyed a variety of outdoor recreational activities in these green spaces, and they used them to forge ethnic and working-class community. While narrating a crucial era in the history of Chicago's urban development, Fisher makes important interventions in debates about working-class leisure, the history of urban parks, environmental justice, the African American experience, immigration history, and the cultural history of nature.

Motor City Green

Motor City Green
Author: Joseph S. Cialdella
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822987023

Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues that Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality. As the city’s social landscape became increasingly uncontrollable, Detroiters turned to parks, gardens, yards, and other outdoor spaces to relieve the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how today’s urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city’s past.

Urban Green Spaces

Urban Green Spaces
Author: Viniece Jennings
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030104699

This book crosses disciplinary boundaries to investigate how the benefits of green spaces can be further incorporated in public health. In this regard, the book highlights how ecosystem services provided by green spaces affect multiple aspects of human health and well-being, offering a strategic way to conceptualize the topic. For centuries, scholars have observed the range of health benefits associated with exposure to nature. As people continue to move to urban areas, it is essential to include green spaces in cities to ensure sustained human health and well-being. Such insights can not only advance the science but also spark interdisciplinary research and help researchers creatively translate their findings into benefits for the public. The book explores this topic in the context of ‘big picture’ frameworks that enhance communication between the environmental, public health, and social sciences.

Green Gentrification

Green Gentrification
Author: Kenneth Gould
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317417801

Green Gentrification looks at the social consequences of urban "greening" from an environmental justice and sustainable development perspective. Through a comparative examination of five cases of urban greening in Brooklyn, New York, it demonstrates that such initiatives, while positive for the environment, tend to increase inequality and thus undermine the social pillar of sustainable development. Although greening is ostensibly intended to improve environmental conditions in neighborhoods, it generates green gentrification that pushes out the working-class, and people of color, and attracts white, wealthier in-migrants. Simply put, urban greening "richens and whitens," remaking the city for the sustainability class. Without equity-oriented public policy intervention, urban greening is negatively redistributive in global cities. This book argues that environmental injustice outcomes are not inevitable. Early public policy interventions aimed at neighborhood stabilization can create more just sustainability outcomes. It highlights the negative social consequences of green growth coalition efforts to green the global city, and suggests policy choices to address them. The book applies the lessons learned from green gentrification in Brooklyn to urban greening initiatives globally. It offers comparison with other greening global cities. This is a timely and original book for all those studying environmental justice, urban planning, environmental sociology, and sustainable development as well as urban environmental activists, city planners and policy makers interested in issues of urban greening and gentrification.

Green Cities

Green Cities
Author: Matthew E. Kahn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"In Green Cities, Matthew Kahn surveys the burgeoning economic literature on the environmental consequences of urban growth. He discusses the environmental Kuznets curve, which theorizes that the relationship between environmental quality and per capita income follows a bell-shaped curve. The heart of the book unpacks and expands this notion by tracing the environmental effects of economic growth, population growth, and suburban sprawl. Kahn considers how cities can deal with the environmental challenges produced by growth. His concluding chapter addresses the role of cities in promoting climate change and asks how cities in turn are likely to be affected by this trend."--BOOK JACKET.

The Smart Enough City

The Smart Enough City
Author: Ben Green
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262352257

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

Naturally Challenged: Contested Perceptions and Practices in Urban Green Spaces

Naturally Challenged: Contested Perceptions and Practices in Urban Green Spaces
Author: Nicola Dempsey
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030444805

This book aims to understand how the wellbeing benefits of urban green space (UGS) are analysed and valued and why they are interpreted and translated into action or inaction, into ‘success’ and/or ‘failure’. The provision, care and use of natural landscapes in urban settings (e.g. parks, woodland, nature reserves, riverbanks) are under-researched in academia and under-resourced in practice. Our growing knowledge of the benefits of natural urban spaces for wellbeing contrasts with asset management approaches in practice that view public green spaces as liabilities. Why is there a mismatch between what we know about urban green space and what we do in practice? What makes some UGS more ‘successful’ than others? And who decides on this measure of ‘success’ and how is this constituted? This book sets out to answer these and related questions by exploring a range of approaches to designing, planning and managing different natural landscapes in urban settings.

Dense + Green

Dense + Green
Author: Thomas Schröpfer
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3038210145

The integration of nature in architecture is a key concern of sustainability. However, all too often sustainable design is reduced to improving the energetic performance of buildings and the ornamental application of natural green. Dense + Green explores new architectural typologies that emerge from the integration of green components such as sky terraces, vertical parks and green facades, in high-density buildings. The book describes green strategies in a comparison across different design tasks and climate conditions. In-depth case studies on the most relevant building types, consistently presented with analytical drawings made exclusively for this book, are complemented by expert essays that demonstrate the current paradigm shift in the sustainable urban environment. From the Contents: • Dense + Green Building Types, by Thomas Schröpfer, architect, Singapore University of Technology and Design • Dense + Green Building Technology, by Atelier Ten, environmental design consultants and building services engineers, New York, NY • Dense + Green Landscape Design, by Herbert Dreiseitl, landscape architect, Atelier Dreiseitl/Rambøll Liveable Cities Lab, Überlingen/Singapore/Portland, OR • Dense + Green Botanical Design, by Jean Yong, plant eco-physiologist, Singapore University of Technology and Design • Dense + Green Urbanism, by Kees Christiaanse, urban planner, ETH Zurich • 25 in-depth case studies from Europe, Asia and the USA • Practice Reports by Foster + Partners, WOHA, Ken Yeang, MVRDV and others