Quintessential Cities, Accountable to the Future
Quintessential Cities, Accountable to the Future

Author: Voula Mega

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-05-29

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1461473489

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​ ​This book can be seen as the third part of an unofficial trilogy on Sustainable Cities of the Future with the author's previous books 'Sustainable Development, Energy and the City' and 'Sustainable Cities for the third millennium: The Odyssey of urban excellence', both prefaced by Prof. Sir Peter Hall. All three books follow the evolving forefront of innovations towards Sustainable Cities. They collectively try to respond to the questions: What future cities wish to build (with their scarcities and capacities) on a finite planet? What do-they do to achieve this? How do-they contribute to redesign the world? The third book adopts, first and foremost, a strategic foresight approach including a scan of the future trends, tensions and risks in a more uncertain world, the possible and preferable futures, emerging policy issues, such as intergenerational cities or cities welcoming the immigrants and their impact on sustainable development, the Rio+20 prospects and the effects of the protracted crisis, efforts by world interconnected cities, including a case-study on Bangkok, a laboratory of urban change, and examples of frugal and resilient urban policies.​

Eco-Responsible Cities and the Global Ocean
Eco-Responsible Cities and the Global Ocean

Author: Voula P. Mega

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-29

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 3319936808

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This book examines the nexus of cities and oceans and the interrelations between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11 and 14, just after the first two critical years following the milestone year of hope in 2015. It advocates for actions both for sustainable cities, the largest interconnected and only human ecosystem, and for the global ocean that is the largest physical ecosystem. Cutting-edge concepts and actions are presented by and for cities and oceans, following the global engagements during the years 2015-2017. In the era of global geopolitics, cities offer major democratic spaces between the micro-regulations of the local communities and the governance of the global commons. The role of education, trust, and citizen empowerment cannot be stressed enough. This book offers an evidence-based, holistic and integrated view of key urban and ocean sustainability issues at the horizon of 2030 and of 2050. The chapters cover the most prominent issues at the heart of the matter, and highlight systemic multi-stakeholder eco-responses towards sustainability with economic, social, environmental dimensions, including political and cultural aspects. This book offers a full exploration of cities and seas with an emphasis on vigorous paradigm shifts, redesigning human systems, and reconciling them with nature. Building on robust evidence, and transformational cases, it provides structured advice for world leaders, stakeholders and scholars.

Conscious Coastal Cities
Conscious Coastal Cities

Author: Voula P. Mega

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-11-02

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 3319202189

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In the age of urban geopolitics, in cooperation with the major city networks and initiatives, interconnected coastal cities lead towards a more resilient sustainable future. This book raises global awareness on the challenges and opportunities for coastal cities and the myriad of issues and stakeholders which impact them. The book offers a panoramic integrated view of the most critical urban coastal sustainability issues shaping the urban horizon of the future. Drawing on the most authoritative studies and asking further questions, the book embraces issues of smart, sustainable and inclusive blue green growth, active social integration, environmental conscience and resilience, food, energy and resource security, exploration and protection of the global ocean, ecosystem-based urban coastal planning and policy and progress in education and science, culture and the arts, coastal urban renaissance and accountable multi-layered governance. From large global ports to small tourism and fishing resorts, sustainable development calls for coastal cities to improve their functions. Coastal cities need to adopt ecosystem-based approaches to manage the land-sea continuum, invest in blue green energy and mobility, attract responsible business investment, and honour the sea as a source of infinite innovation and culture.

Human Sustainable Cities
Human Sustainable Cities

Author: Voula Mega

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-26

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 3031048407

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This book argues that accelerating action toward sustainability for and by cities and their inhabitants can make a huge difference to humanity’s endeavor to recover from current crises and build a sustainable future. It sheds light on cutting-edge concepts and actions toward sustainability that can taken by and for cities and with citizens. In this book, author Voula Mega takes the reader on a journey inside and across cities and highlights efforts toward a paradigmatic shift that reconciles human systems with nature. Leadership, education, innovation, trust and citizen empowerment all play a crucial role for the co-invention of a new model that balances human well-being, sustainable prosperity and the future of the planet. Building on robust evidence and inspired by best practices, Human Sustainable Cities offers compelling messages and convincing advice to all stakeholders who are striving to overcome crises, speed up the path toward resilience and preparedness and bounce forward better.

Connecting Places, Connecting People
Connecting Places, Connecting People

Author: Reena Tiwari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-07

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1315449226

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What is a better community? How can we reconfigure places and transport networks to create environmentally friendly, economically sound, and socially just communities? How can we meet the challenges of growing pollution, depleting fossil fuels, rising gasoline prices, traffic congestion, traffic fatalities, increased prevalence of obesity, and lack of social inclusion? The era of car-based planning has led to the disconnection of people and place in developed countries, and is rapidly doing so in the developing countries of the Global South. The unfolding mega-trend in technological innovation, while adding new patterns of future living and mobility in the cities, will question the relevance of face-to-face connections. What will be the ‘glue’ that holds communities together in the future? To build better communities and to build better cities, we need to reconnect people and places. Connecting Places, Connecting People offers a new paradigm for place making by reordering urban planning principles from prioritizing movement of vehicles to focusing on places and the people who live in them. Numerous case studies, including many from developing countries in the Global South, illustrate how this can be realized or fallen short of in practical terms. Importantly, citizens need to be engaged in policy development, to connect with each other and with government agencies. To measure the connectivity attributes of places and the success of strategies to meet the needs, an Audit Tool is offered for a continual quantitative and qualitative evaluation.

Decentralized Governance and Accountability
Decentralized Governance and Accountability

Author: Jonathan A. Rodden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1108571093

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At the end of the twentieth century, academics and policymakers welcomed a trend toward fiscal and political decentralization as part of a potential solution for slow economic growth and poor performance by insulated, unaccountable governments. For the last two decades, researchers have been trying to answer a series of vexing questions about the political economy of multi-layered governance. Much of the best recent research on decentralization has come from close collaborations between university researchers and international aid institutions. As the volume and quality of this collaborative research have increased in recent decades, the time has come to review the lessons from this literature and apply them to debates about future programming. In this volume, the contributors place this research in the broader history of engagement between aid institutions and academics, particularly in the area of decentralized governance, and outline the challenges and opportunities to link evidence and policy action.

Liberty, Property, and the Future of Constitutional Development
Liberty, Property, and the Future of Constitutional Development

Author: Ellen Frankel Paul

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1990-07-05

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780791403044

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This book is a discussion of current trends in the constitutional protection of economic liberties. Since the mid-1930’s, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to replace legislative judgements on matters of economic regulation with its own. While the Court permits wide legislative experimentation in the economic realm, it scrutinizes governmental attempts to regulate or abridge other civil liberties quite closely. This state of affairs is known as the “double standard.” The question of the appropriateness of this unequal treatment by the Court of these two classes of liberties generates much of the controversy in this volume. Other topics dealt with include the current trends in (and relevance of) constitutional law for welfare rights, labor unions, and labor law. Recent Supreme Court decisions on property rights also receive much attention.

The Open-Ended City
The Open-Ended City

Author: Kathryn Holliday

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1477318631

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Texas Historical Commission Award of Excellence in Media Achievement, Texas Historical Commission In 1980, David Dillon launched his career as an architectural critic with a provocative article that asked “Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?” Over the next quarter century, he offered readers of the Dallas Morning News a vision of how good architecture and planning could improve quality of life, combatting the negative effects of urban sprawl, civic fragmentation, and rapacious real estate development typical in Texas cities. The Open-Ended City gathers more than sixty key articles that helped establish Dillon’s national reputation as a witty and acerbic critic, showing readers why architecture matters and how it can enrich their lives. Kathryn E. Holliday discusses how Dillon connected culture, commerce, history, and public life in ways that few columnists and reporters ever get the opportunity to do. The articles she includes touch on major themes that animated Dillon’s writing: downtown redevelopment, suburban sprawl, arts and culture, historic preservation, and the necessity of aesthetic quality in architecture as a baseline for thriving communities. While the specifics of these articles will resonate with those who care about Dallas, Fort Worth, and other Texas cities, they are also deeply relevant to all architects, urbanists, and citizens who engage in the public life and planning of cities. As a collection, The Open-Ended City persuasively demonstrates how a discerning critic helped to shape a landmark city by shaping the conversation about its architecture.

The Century of Global Cities
The Century of Global Cities

Author: Andrea Tobia Zevi

Publisher: Ledizioni

Published: 2020-01-12

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 8855260901

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Cities are gaining importance and influence worldwide. They sustain the global economy, set cultural trends, produce greenhouse gas emissions and consume energy; they attract migration flows and foster new political waves. While cities were supposed to be declining back in the 1980s, the globalised economy has established them as crucial world hubs leading billions of people on every continent, both at the top and the bottom of the social ladder, to move to cities. Today, global cities cry out for a more prominent role. But why and to what extent do they matter? Can they really stand alone in the global arena? How are they interacting with governments and multilateral organisations? From climate change to connectivity, from inequalities to migration: what is their contribution to key global challenges?

Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability
Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability

Author: Jennifer Gomez Menjivar

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2022-12-20

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0822988941

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Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability examines the way Afrodescendant and Black communities use the land on which they live, the rule of law, and their bodies to assert their historical, ontological, and physical presence across South, Central, and North America. Their demand for the recognition of ancestral lands, responsive policies, and human rights sheds new light on their permanent yet tenuous presence throughout the region. The authors argue that by deploying a discourse of transcontinental historical continuity, Black communities assert their presence in local, national, and international political spheres. This conceptualization of hemispheric Blackness is the driving force confronting the historical loss, dismissal, and disparagement of Black lives across the Américas. Through twelve case studies that cover a wide range of locations, their work examines contemporary manifestations of sovereignty of Black body and mind, Black-Indigenous nexuses, and national revisions that challenge more than a quincentennial of denial and state unaccountability in the hemisphere.