Handbook on Urban Sustainability

Product Description

Municipal authorities and agencies around the world are striving to place their cities on the road to sustainability. Cities, as very complex entities, offer a constant interaction between people, resources and the environment. This makes strategic planning demanding and difficult.

This book, written by worldwide specialists from Canada, India, Italy, Palestine, Peru, Spain and the Netherlands, is a guide to establishing a city on a sustainable path. It addresses sustainable urban planning issues by breaking the city down to its main components. The authors analyze and discuss such topics as:

urban social and economic factors, including immigration and cultural integration, the gender component, the formation of slums, and social indicators

the interaction of the city with the environment, including the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)

urban and regional economics, including specialization and dependency, asset management, and community facilities

the relationship of a city within its region

urban planning, including urban sprawl and core revitalization

housing and relocation, including such concepts as community participation

degradation and measures to reverse this situation

energy needs, transportation management, basic infrastructural services, the generation and disposal of waste, and water in the region

a citys preparedness, including risk analysis and contingency plans

urban reconstruction after disasters

The concluding chapters provide a what to do and how to do it practical roadmap for implementing a sustainability program.

Book Description

This book presents important new research on applied eco-efficiency concepts throughout Europe. The aim of eco-efficiency is to achieve market-based measures of environmental protection, in order to enhance the prospects for sustainable development and achieve positive economic and ecological benefits.

The distinguished authors discuss a number of themes surrounding eco-efficiency including the necessary conditions for technological dissemination and ecological modernization, and the role of government in enabling businesses and society to participate actively in this process. In particular, they highlight the application of existing European-based policies concerning material flows and energy. The authors also investigate some new concepts of sustainable development and provide a useful introduction to material flows analysis. In further chapters they study the emerging regulatory policies for eco-efficiency, and examine the issues of sustainable business and consumption strategies.

Book Description

The environmental impacts of sprawling development have been well documented, but few comprehensive studies have examined its economic costs. In 1996, a team of experts undertook a multi-year study designed to provide quantitative measures of the costs and benefits of different forms of growth. Sprawl Costs presents a concise and readable summary of the results of that study.

The authors analyze the extent of sprawl, define an alternative, more compact form of growth, project the magnitude and location of future growth, and compare what the total costs of those two forms of growth would be if each was applied throughout the nation. They analyze the likely effects of continued sprawl, consider policy options, and discuss examples of how more compact growth would compare with sprawl in particular regions. Finally, they evaluate whether compact growth is likely to produce the benefits claimed by its advocates.

The book represents a comprehensive and objective analysis of the costs and benefits of different approaches to growth, and gives decision-makers and others concerned with planning and land use realistic and useful data on the implications of various options and policies.

Customer Reviews:

Potent ammo against unchecked growth.......2006-04-23

As a rural resident trying to help my town control predatory developers and manage issues of growth and land use, this book is a potent tool, a fact that is clearly disturbing to some who stand to profit handsomely from sprawl, like the automobile and oil companies, the large-scale construction industries, millionaire developers, automobile manufacturers, and big-box national retailers.

It's interesting that Diane Bast has written a negative review without mentioning, either here or in her Amazon.com profile, that she holds the title of Vice President of Internal Affairs for the benign-sounding (and Richard Mellon Schiafe-funded) "Heartland Institute," whose work she cites here.

She also fails to mention that her husband Joseph L. Bast is also founder, president and CEO of the Institute, whose board of directors includes representatives from General Motors, Exxon-Mobil, and Philip Morris, along with various banks and insurance companies. The Institute has also over the years received substantial funding from the tobacco industry, among other large multinational companies. Of course, none of these board members mention these affiliations on Heartland's flowers-and-little-kids adorned official website, because that would be giving the real purpose of the organization away.

I doubt that such an organization would subsidize any research which would support public transportation or de-emphasize converting far-flung farmland or open space into cookie-cutter subdivisions, so Ms. Bast's citations are unsurprising given her unmentioned affiliation to that organization.

As for Mr. Cox, a quick check of his consultancy website reveals his purpose is to denigrate comprehensive planning efforts (because they supposedly put constraints on private ownership and the so-called "free market") and to promote gasoline-powered transportation over rail, public transportation and other environmentally- friendly alternatives. (In the 1920s and 30s, a consortium of carmakers and tire manufacturers bought up and dismantled existing electric trolley systems in major cities, and Mr. Cox and his colleagues are apparently dedicated to making sure that such systems stay dead.)

In fact, despite Ms. Bast's derision of "politics" as a factor in the costs of sprawl, the Heartland Institute has been more than willing to use politics to its own corporate ends, including coordinating the blast-faxing of legislators to oppose or overturn anti-smoking, pro-environmental and health-care regulatory legislation that could cut into the profits of its benefactor companies. Despite her sprinkling her review with references to the poor and minorities, her organization believes in unfettered corporate power, first and foremost. I believe the reader should take that into account when reading her comments.

The fact remains that sprawl enriches developers, car manufacturers, oil and real estate companies much, much more than individual homeowners, who find that as gas hits $3 - $4 a gallon and above, and their property taxes jump as overburdened small towns try to cope with the sudden need to build new schools and keep formerly little-used town roads in repair, that their "affordable" homes cost them more to own than they imagined -- and that the only part of the supposed wealth they generate is when they sell them, long after the strip-mall, big-box and cookie-cutter developers have pocketed their profits and gone elsewhere.

There is a biological analog to unfettered and out of control growth. It's called "cancer." Cancer eventually kills its host. Sprawl kills community life and saps a region's vitality. This book lays out the evidence in black and white.

For more information on the Heartland Institute, go to www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute.

Will We Become a Nation of Renters?.......2005-12-13

According to an article by Wendell Cox, senior fellow for The Heartland Institute, this book rehashes the tired claims about suburbanization (pejoratively called "urban sprawl") being unnecessarily costly. In fact, however, Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development (by Robert Burchell, Anthony Downs, Barbara McCann, and Sahan Mukheri) relies on prospective data that is soundly refuted by reality.

The book is an outgrowth of a study led by Burchell, which concluded that more compact (less suburban) development could save $225,000,000,000 in government spending over 25 years. The study made the all-too-common error of concluding that many zeros after a number make it significant. They do not. It will probably take the average reader at least 225,000,000,000 nanoseconds to read this article. $225 billion over 25 years is less than $30 per capita each year. This is a pittance in comparison with overall government expenditures, which have risen more than 100 times that fast over the past 25 years after adjustment for inflation.

Aside from the shock value, the validity of the numbers is questionable. In fact, the suburbs are not more expensive. Joshua Utt and I published research analyzing Bureau of the Census data for more than 700 municipalities concluding that actual (not theoretical) per-capita public expenditures are lowest in the newer suburbs. Even sewer costs were found to be lowest in the newer suburbs. The principal reasons are that politics, congestion, and labor costs drive costs higher in more compact development.

Sprawl Costs' weakest assertion may be that more compact development would reduce the cost of an average new house $16,000, a conjecture that ignores economic reality. To accomplish the more compact development Burchell et al. would prefer requires stringent regulation, such as urban growth boundaries, greenbelts, and other limits on development. Rationing land, like anything else, results in higher prices. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, in work published by Harvard University, reported that the principal cause of differences in housing affordability among U.S. metropolitan areas is zoning and land regulation.

The current "housing bubble" is most pronounced where there is strong land rationing-places like California, Portland, and the Northeast, from Boston to Washington's Virginia and Maryland suburbs. In the past five years actual house prices in those areas have risen $200,000 more than the average in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston, growth dynamos where there is little land rationing. In just five years, the conjectural $16,000 savings over 25 years have been consumed 12 times over by the actual excess price increases in areas that have implemented the very strategies required to compel the compact development advocated by Burchell et al.

Moreover, with minority home ownership in the U.S. a full third below the Non-Hispanic White homeownership rate, the cost-increasing effects of land rationing are today denying opportunity and blocking the ladder to the economic mainstream. Of course, the higher prices will also drive other millions out of the homeownership market.

All of this shifts wealth from young to old and poorer to richer in a perverse trickle-up economy. The American Dream is under threat. A nation of renters will be less affluent.

None of this is to suggest that suburbanization should be the favored form of urban development. Instead, people should be allowed to live and work where and how they like. Anti-suburban interests have yet to find a compelling reason why this should not be so.

Sprawl Costs misses the economic opportunities and wealth that have been created by broad home ownership, made possible by building new houses on inexpensive land in the suburbs. It is not surprising that virtually all urban growth in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has been suburban for decades. Consumers know better. What Burchell et al. perceive as costs are really benefits.

Wendell Cox (cox@heartland.org) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Sprawl on our wallets.......2005-11-16

I just heard one of the authors on talk radio out here and must say that I was blown away by the amount of money sprawl costs every year. Just making a list of the items that tap into our tax dollars is staggering: schools, highways, sewers, electricity, water. And if you watch a new housing development going into the desert, this fact is so obvious---much of the bill must be paid by all the rest of us, how else could they afford all those big costs. So I know the argument for sprawl is that if we didn't have it, housing prices would go through the roof. But one sensible point this author made is that with a very limited change in the way we live, would result in a massive savings to our government spending. So I hope people will listen to this message cause it seems to make sense to me. Looking forward to reading the book, and I hope government officials will as well.

Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management

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Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management
Bryan G. Norton
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226595218

Book Description

While many disciplines contribute to environmental conservation, there is little successful integration of science and social values. Arguing that the central problem in conservation is a lack of effective communication, Bryan Norton shows in Sustainability how current linguistic resources discourage any shared, multidisciplinary public deliberation over environmental goals and policy. In response, Norton develops a new, interdisciplinary approach to defining sustainability—the cornerstone of environmental policy—using philosophical and linguistic analyses to create a nonideological vocabulary that can accommodate scientific and evaluative environmental discourse.

Emphasizing cooperation and adaptation through social learning, Norton provides a practical framework that encourages an experimental approach to language clarification and problem formulation, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to creating solutions. By moving beyond the scientific arena to acknowledge the importance of public discourse, Sustainability offers an entirely novel approach to environmentalism.

Life Region: The Social and Cultural Ecology of Sustainable Development (Routledge Studies in Development and Society)

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Life Region: The Social and Cultural Ecology of Sustainable Development (Routledge Studies in Development and Society)
Per Raberg
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0415159059

Book Description

The Life Region launches a strategy for sustainable development, setting out from a socio-ecological position and developing a model for a socially and culturally supportive community, or 'Life Region'.

Competitive Environmental Strategy: A Guide To The Changing Business Landscape

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Competitive Environmental Strategy: A Guide To The Changing Business Landscape
Andrew J. Hoffman
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
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Fiskars 10-Inch Wallace Hedge Shears #91806935

ASIN: 1559637722

Book Description

Environmental concerns can greatly affect business success, regardless of whether a business person or corporation shares those concerns. Today's corporate managers must understand the power of environmental issues, and shift their mindset from one focused on environmental "management" to one focused on strategy.

Competitive Environmental Strategy examines the effects of environmentalism on corporate management, explaining how and why environmental forces are driving change and how business managers can think about environmental issues in a strategic way. The author discusses:

the evolving drivers of corporate environmental strategy, including regulators, shareholders, buyers and suppliers, insurers, investors, and consumers
how environmentalism alters basic conceptions of competitive strategy and organizational design
how external institutions create both opportunity and limitations for environmental strategy
how environmental threats can be incorporated into risk management, capital acquisition, competitive position, and other management concerns

The book ends with an overall discussion of competitive environmental strategy and draws connections to the emerging issue of sustainable development. Each chapter features insets that ask fundamental questions about the relationship between environmental protection and business strategy, and ends with a list of additional recommended readings. Every individual who wishes to engage in business management in the 21st century will need an appreciation for the implications of environmental issues on corporate activities, and vice-versa.

Book Description

* Shows how parks can effectively promote both the conservation of biodiversity and rural development
* Examines the competing demands on parks and provides lessons, derived from over fifty case studies, applicable to parks around the world
* Researched and written by top scholar-practitioners from the Southern Africa Sustainable Use Specialist Group of IUCN

Parks face intense pressure both to conserve biodiversity and provide economic opportunities for rural communities. Based on the insight from over fifty case studies, this book synthesizes lessons to guide park management in transitional economies where the challenges of poverty and governance can be severe.
The central insight is that parks are common property regimes that supposedly serve society. If parks are set aside to serve poor people, should conservation demands over-rule demands for jobs and economic growth? Or will deliberately using parks as bridgeheads for better land use and engines for rural development produce more and better conservation? Accountability emerges as a major issue at all levels, including the problematic linkages between park authorities and the political system, and the ability to measure park performance. This book provides important lessons in park management regarding the relationship between conservation and commercialization, performance management, new systems of governance and management, and linkages between parks, landscape and the land-use economy.

Sustainable Development and Innovation in the Energy Sector

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Sustainable Development and Innovation in the Energy Sector
Ulrich Steger , Wouter Achterberg , Kornelis Blok , Henning Bode , Walter Frenz , Corinna Gather , Gerd Hanekamp , Dieter Imboden , Matthias Jahnke , Michael Kost , Rudi Kurz , Hans G. Nutzinger , and Thomas H.W. Ziesemer
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 354023103X

Book Description

Almost every energy scenario assumes an enormous growth in the demand for energy in the coming decades. Meanwhile, at international conferences and other venues, the primary concern is massive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, especially of the CO2 produced by fossil-fuel energy consumption. Experts also point out the political risk of depending on petroleum and remind us of the fact that resources are not inexhaustible. This timely book explores: how these conflicting scenarios could be reconciled; how can we shape a more sustainable energy system from the existing one; and possible technological progress and innovations to enable a brighter future. It also addresses the reality that there exists no consensus on the extent to which innovations can really contribute to reconciling ever-growing energy consumption, availability of resources and the environment, and the structural demands on any energy system.

Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business (Conscientious Commerce)

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Global view on sustainability
Low on content and little practical guidance
Low on content and little practical guidance
a guide to get from here to there
The bible of sustainability

Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business (Conscientious Commerce)
John Elkington
Manufacturer: New Society Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0865713928

Book Description

In Cannibals with Forks, best-selling author and green business guru John Elkington convincingly argues that future market success will often depend upon a company's ability to satisfy the three-pronged fork of profitability, environmental quality, and social justice. This lively and practical guide outlines the seven great "sustainable" revolutions that are already unfolding, showing how business leaders should respond and profiles some of the world's best-known companies including Nike, Wal-mart, Levi Strauss, Volkswagen, Texaco, Intel, Volvo, Dow Chemical, Electrolux, Novo Nordisk, and Shell.

Customer Reviews:

Global view on sustainability.......2003-06-12

Do not expect from this book practical guidelines to become "sustainable" as some reviewers seemed to have expected. This book explains in detail what sustainability involves, three majors fields: economical, social and environmental that the author called the triple bottom line. Each field has been for long separated from each other and the new trend for sustainability is to make them working together. How? There are no answers in this book. This book does not want to offer solutions but just to show us that this so-called revolution has already started, based on existing facts and where these changes are taking places.

Low on content and little practical guidance.......2003-04-01

This book is bogged down in useless metaphores and imprecise, whooly language - well suited neither for practical decision-makers nor serious academics. Claims are not explained sufficiently well, and we are left guessing how to solve - or even understand - the important problems that this book claims to adress.

Low on content and little practical guidance.......2003-04-01

a guide to get from here to there.......2003-01-28

Elkington has created an awesome nuts and bolts description of where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. If The Ecology of Commerce (Paul Hawken) lays the visionary groundwork, this book is the next step. It adds in a lot of detail, bringing to light many cases and ideas about specific problems. It is a slow read but well worth the time.

The bible of sustainability.......2001-03-14

You can expect a complete perspective from the head of an organisation called SustainAbility on sustainability. That is what you get. John Elkington makes a useful classification of Non Governmental Organisations. The polarisers don't want to have anything to do with business. Business is in principle bad and should be watched and harassed. The integrators try to add two additional dimensions to business, environmental and social responsibility. Discriminators differentiate between good and bad businesses and the non-discriminators do not. This book is for the discriminating integrators. John Elkington believes that it is possible and necessary to get all businesses to act responsibly concerning profit and social and environmental issues- the triple bottom line. The book provides an excellent historical perspective of why businesses are moving on from the Friedman doctrine stating that the only social responsibility of a business is to make a profit. A business that wants to move in the sustainability direction can use the book to find out where it is on the path to full sustainability. The book also makes many practical suggestions on how to move forwards. The book is equally useful for NGOs, and public policy makers.

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)

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Success in Grassroots Politics
How does environmentalism happen?

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Arun Agrawal
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822334925

Book Description

In Kumaon in northern India, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment. Yet by the 1990s, they had begun to conserve their forests carefully. In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this striking transformation. He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related. In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combined—in an approach he calls environmentality—to better understand changes in conservation efforts. Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon: local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources.

Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research. He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he assessed the state of village forests, interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis, and examined local records. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment. In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the interconnections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.

Customer Reviews:

Success in Grassroots Politics.......2006-03-22

This book reports a rare success story in Third World conservation: the rise of grassroots-level forest management in Kumaon, India. In the colonial period, the British tried to stop deforestation by increasingly authoritarian methods. This failed; the local countryfolk, prevented from using their forests for subsistence needs, protested more and more seriously, ultimately resorting to arson. Eventually the British got the message and eased off. Fortunately, the Indian government later built on this perception, and gave more and more management rights to the Kumaonese. They rose to the occasion, and now manage the forests reasonably well. Arun Agrawal uses a Foucauldian approach to analyze the development of local management in an extremely fine-grained, detailed, careful way. The benefit of this approach is that it has stimulated a uniquely thorough and fair ethnography. The cost of this approach is its narrow focus on government and "subjects"--there is no independent assessment of how well the forests are actually doing. One wishes for a biologist's input. Still, any success story, even relative, is welcome these days, and this book will be very useful to anyone interested in comanagement of resources or resource conservation in general. We simply have to involve local people and respect their needs, in every conservation project, and this book is notably good at detailing one way a governmental system actually did that.

How does environmentalism happen?.......2005-11-16

Arun Agrawal's book offers a fresh approach to consider how subjectivities change, particularly in terms of how environmentalism happens at an individual and social level. Agrawal borrows from a number of different fields, including anthropology and history, to pursue these questions. His approach differs from several dominant schools that address these issues. One group of scholars, when talking about rural citizens in developing countries, assume that their needs are primarily material and antagonistic to any sense of long-term environmental care. "Environmentalist sensibilities don't make any sense unless their bellies are full" they say. Another group of scholars argues that rural women, because they rely on natural resources for their familiy's daily needs, are actually quite environmentally minded.

Agrawal does not follow either of these approaches, and questions a number of their premises. To carry out his inquiry, Agrawal examines a region in India that was famous for its resistance to British forest protection during the colonial era. This area resisted British authority by lighting hundreds of deliberately set fires. Surprisingly, Agrawal now finds that a number of villages are forming their own community-based groups for forest protection, and he seeks to discover what accounts for these changes.

In his explanation, Agrawal draws on Foucauldian and other post-structural thought, but does so in novel ways. He is trying to examine the process of how subjects change over time, and even over the course of one lifetime. His writing is lively and his analysis is sharp. I highly recommend this book for those interested in social change, social theory, environmentalism, and new interdisciplinary approaches.

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