Special Issue "Sustainable Cities"
Quicklinks
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2013)
Special Issue Editor
Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Peter Newman
Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute, Curtin University, Fremantle WA 6160, Australia
Website: http://sustainability.curtin.edu.au
E-Mail: p.newman@curtin.edu.au
Phone: +61 8 9266 9032
Fax: +61 8 9266 9031
Interests: liveable cities; sustainable transport; urban metabolism; biophillic cities; urban policy and practice; urban regeneration; green infrastructures; resilience
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The Rio+20 UN conference has highlighted that there is still life and vitality in the concept of sustainability. The greatest frontier remains how to bring this idea into mainstream practice in our cities. The growth of cities and their consumption of the earth's resources must become a critical focus for policy and practice or the issues of climate change, oil vulnerability, water and biodiversity will become too hard. But sustainability demands that solutions to these issues are done in a way that not only is more cost effective but it helps to create more opportunities for people to improve their quality of life. This special issue of Sustainability is seeking papers that can demonstrate how these environmental, economic and social goals can be achieved synergistically and can be applied in practice now. It is seeking papers on these solutions from a variety of city types across the globe.
Prof. Dr. Peter Newman
Guets Editor
Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 800 CHF (Swiss Francs).
Keywords
- sustainable cities
- urban metabolism
- green urbanism
- biophillic cities
- urban regeneration
- sustainable transport
- localised energy
- green economy
- resilience
Published Papers (8 papers)
|
Received: 4 January 2013; in revised form: 15 February 2013 / Accepted: 28 February 2013 / Published: 7 March 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (602 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: The construction and service of urban infrastructure systems and buildings involves immense resource consumption. Cities are responsible for the largest component of global energy, water, and food consumption as well as related sewage and organic waste production. Due to ongoing global urbanization, in which the largest sector of the global population lives in cities which are already built, global level strategies need to be developed that facilitate both the sustainable construction of new cities and the re-development of existing urban environments. A very promising approach in this regard is the decentralization and building integration of environmentally sound infrastructure systems for integrated resource management. This paper discusses such new and innovative building services engineering systems, which could contribute to increased energy efficiency, resource productivity, and urban resilience. Applied research and development projects in Germany, which are based on integrated system approaches for the integrated and environmentally sound management of energy, water and organic waste, are used as examples. The findings are especially promising and can be used to stimulate further research and development, including economical aspects which are crucial for sustainable urban (re-)development.
|
|
Received: 1 February 2013; in revised form: 19 March 2013 / Accepted: 3 April 2013 / Published: 29 April 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (758 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: The transport sector is the second largest and one of the fastest growing energy end-use sectors, representing 24% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency has developed scenarios for the transport sector within the overall concept of mitigation pathways that would be required to limit global warming to 2 °C. This paper builds on these scenarios and illustrates various passenger travel-related strategies for achieving a 2° transport scenario, in particular looking at how much technology improvement is needed in the light of different changes in travel and modal shares in OECD and non-OECD countries. It finds that an integrated approach using all feasible policy options is likely to deliver the required emission reductions at least cost, and that stronger travel-related measures result in significantly lower technological requirements.
|
|
Received: 6 February 2013; in revised form: 13 April 2013 / Accepted: 26 April 2013 / Published: 2 May 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (602 KB) | Download XML Full-text | 
Abstract: Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) can be used by cities to account for their on-going demands on global renewable resources. To date, EFA has not been fully implemented as an urban policy and planning tool in part due to limitations of local data availability. In this paper we focus on the material consumption component of the urban ecological footprint and identify the ‘component, solid waste life cycle assessment approach’ as one that overcomes data limitations by using data many cities regularly collect: municipal, solid waste composition data which serves as a proxy for material consumption. The approach requires energy use and/or carbon dioxide emissions data from process LCA studies as well as agricultural and forest land data for calculation of a material’s ecological footprint conversion value. We reviewed the process LCA literature for twelve materials commonly consumed in cities and determined ecological footprint conversion values for each. We found a limited number of original LCA studies but were able to generate a range of values for each material. Our set of values highlights the importance for cities to identify both the quantities consumed and per unit production impacts of a material. Some materials like textiles and aluminum have high ecological footprints but make up relatively smaller proportions of urban waste streams than products like paper and diapers. Local government use of the solid waste LCA approach helps to clearly identify the ecological loads associated with the waste they manage on behalf of their residents. This direct connection can be used to communicate to citizens about stewardship, recycling and ecologically responsible consumption choices that contribute to urban sustainability.
|
|
Received: 21 January 2013; in revised form: 7 April 2013 / Accepted: 22 April 2013 / Published: 6 May 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (780 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: The notion “risk governance” refers to an integrated concept on how to deal with public risks in general, and so-called complex, ambiguous and uncertain risks in particular. These ideas have been informed by interdisciplinary research drawing from sociological and psychological research on risk, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and research by policy scientists and legal scholars. The notion of risk governance pertains to the many ways in which many actors, individuals and institutions, public and private, deal with risks. It includes formal institutions and regimes and informal arrangements. The paper will first develop an adaptive and integrative framework of risk governance and applies this model to the risks of urban planning. After a short summary of the roots of risk governance, key concepts, such as simple, uncertain, complex and ambiguous risks, will be discussed. The main emphasis will be on each of the five phases of risk governance: pre-assessment, interdisciplinary assessment, risk evaluation, risk management and risk communication. The paper will explain how these phases of risk governance can be applied to the area of urban planning and improve the dynamic sustainability of cities.
|
|
Received: 1 February 2013; in revised form: 28 April 2013 / Accepted: 30 April 2013 / Published: 7 May 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (601 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: Many cities across the United States have embraced programs aimed at achieving greater sustainability. This may seem surprising, particularly since adopting aggressive environmental protection programs is regarded by some as inimical to economic development. An alternative perspective is that in the modern city sustainability can be part of an economic development strategy. What is largely missing from the literature on sustainable cities’ policies and programs is systematic analysis of the political dynamics that seem to affect support for, and adoption and implementation of, local sustainability policies. To explore the actual behavior of cities with respect to sustainability and economic development policies, two original databases on 50 large U.S. cities are used. One source of data is composed of survey responses from city councilors, agency administrators, and leaders of local advocacy groups in each of these cities. The second database contains information as to what these 50 cities actually do in terms of sustainable programs and policies. In testing a series of hypotheses, findings suggest that: a high number of programs aimed at achieving sustainability is linked to the inclusion of environmental advocacy groups; that this relationship is not compromised by business advocacy; and that inclusion of environmental groups in policymaking seems to be supported, rather than impeded, by high rates of economic growth by the cities.
|
|
Received: 1 March 2013; in revised form: 6 May 2013 / Accepted: 7 May 2013 / Published: 8 May 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (640 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: Cities at all stages of development need to provide jobs, food and services for their people. There is no formula that can unilaterally be applied in all urban environments to achieve this. The complex interaction of social, economic and ecological cycles within cities makes it impossible to predict outcomes. Resilience theory, with its engineering, multi-equilibria and socio-ecological approaches, provides some of the foundations for understanding the full range of the complex social and ecological interactions that underpin sustainable cities. It is proposed that these insights could be extended by a sharper focus on the social and technological innovation that has traditionally been the emphasis of vulnerability and transition theories respectively.
|
|
Received: 29 March 2013; in revised form: 9 May 2013 / Accepted: 20 May 2013 / Published: 24 May 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (866 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: Australia’s urban built environment contributes significantly to the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions; therefore, encouraging urban development to pursue low-carbon outcomes will aid in reducing carbon in the overall economy. Cities and urban areas are configured in precincts, which have been identified as an ideal scale for low-carbon technologies that address energy, water and waste. Even though new governance models and systems are being created to enable low-carbon precincts to operate with a degree of independence within a broader centralised utility structure, greater effort is required to refocus governance on this smaller scale of delivery. Furthermore, at this time, no consistent carbon accounting framework is in place to measure emissions or emission reductions at this scale, thereby limiting the ability to acknowledge or reward progressive, sustainable low-carbon developments. To respond to this situation, a framework is proposed that could form both the basis of a carbon certification scheme for the built environment and provide a platform for generating carbon credits from urban development.
|
|
Received: 22 April 2013; in revised form: 10 May 2013 / Accepted: 17 May 2013 / Published: 24 May 2013
Show/Hide Abstract
| Download PDF Full-text (108 KB) | Download XML Full-text
Abstract: Sustainability issues involve complex interactions between social, economic, and environmental factors that are often viewed quite differently by disparate stakeholder groups. Issues of non-sustainability are wicked problems that have many, often obscure causes, and for which there is no single, straightforward solution. Furthermore, the concept of sustainability is itself contested. For example there are disputes over whether a strong or weak interpretation of sustainability should be adopted. In cities, as elsewhere, sustainability therefore requires discursive plurality and multiple sites of action. It is the thesis of this paper that effective problem solving, decision-making and enacting of a sustainability agenda require deliberative collaborative governance (DCG), a logical hybrid of the closely related fields of deliberative democracy and collaborative governance. We provide a provisional typology of different modes of deliberative collaborative governance, explaining each with a sustainability example, with a particular focus on DCG initiatives for planning in Western Australia. It is argued that the lens provided by such a typology can help us to understand the factors likely to promote better resolution of wicked problems and increased sustainability.
|
Last update: 26 June 2012
