•Novel socio-cultural valuation framework for green infrastructure and climate impacts.•People are more aware of present-day heat waves but more alarmed by future flooding.•People tend to prefer ...diverse, familiar and visually attractive adaptation measures.•Environmental education can increase support for effective adaptation measures.•Results help planners prioritize effective and desired green infrastructure designs.
Cities are particularly prone to the effects of climate change. One way for cities to adapt is by enhancing their green infrastructure (GI) to mitigate the impacts of heat waves and flooding. While alternative GI design options exist, there are many unknowns regarding public support for the various options. This study aims to fill this gap by performing a socio-cultural valuation of urban GI for climate adaptation that encompasses multiple dimensions: people’s notion of and concerns about climate impacts, the degree to which people acknowledge the benefits of GI to alleviate such impacts, and people’s preferences for different GI measures, including their willingness to pay (WTP). Data were collected through photo-assisted face-to-face surveys (n=200) with residents in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and linked to GI GIS data. Respondents had a notion of and concerns about climate impacts, but did not necessarily acknowledge that GI may help tackle these issues. Yet, when residents were informed about the adaptation capacity of different GI measures, their preferences shifted towards the most effective options. There was no information effect, however, on people’s WTP for GI, which was mostly related to income and ethnicity. Our study shows that economic valuation alone would miss nuances that socio-cultural valuation as applied in this paper can reveal. The method revealed preferences for particular adaptation designs, and assists in detecting why policy for climate adaptation may be hampered. Understanding people’s views on climate impacts and adaptation options is crucial for prioritizing effective policy responses in the face of climate change.
Objetivos: la naturaleza policéntrica de las estructuras de gobernanza multinivel con múltiples actores que interactúan en diferentes niveles puede facilitar las transiciones sostenibles. Este ...estudio tiene como objetivo explorar el impacto de la gobernanza multinivel en el diseño y la implementación de planes de movilidad urbana sostenible dentro de la estructura gubernamental de dos niveles de Suecia. Metodología: el estudio se basa en una revisión cualitativa de la literatura académica, fuentes secundarias que incluyen una revisión de documentos de políticas nacionales y conocimientos empíricos extraídos del estudio de caso de Umeå, una ciudad sueca de tamaño mediano que participa en varios programas nacionales, locales e iniciativas transnacionales para acelerar las transiciones hacia la sostenibilidad. Los datos empíricos se recopilan a través de entrevistas semiestructuradas con expertos en políticas, formuladores de políticas, transporte y planificadores urbanos que son responsables de la formulación e implementación de políticas de transporte dentro de las instituciones nacionales y locales. Resultados: la gobernanza multinivel de las políticas de transporte y movilidad urbana sostenible en Suecia produce varios efectos positivos para el diseño y la implementación de políticas. Estos incluyen una clara división de responsabilidades entre las autoridades públicas a nivel de gobierno nacional, regional y local, lo que ayuda a superar problemas como la falta de rendición de cuentas y responsabilidad. Conclusiones: la gobernanza multinivel de las políticas de movilidad urbana sostenible en Suecia permite a las autoridades locales tener acceso a recursos adicionales e intercambio de conocimientos a través de redes compuestas por varios actores públicos y privados.
•Human heat stress in a residential district is simulated for different green coverage scenarios.•The impact of trees on human thermal comfort is quantified for a heat wave day.•Green coverage is ...capable of reducing mean radiant temperatures by 43K.•Green coverage is capable of reducing mean physiologically equivalent temperatures by 22K.•The human-biometeorological performance of the ENVI-met model is validated.
The potential of urban green coverage to mitigate human heat stress is studied using the ENVI met model V4. The simulation domain is a residential district in Freiburg, a mid-size city in Southwest Germany. It is characterised by residential buildings and street canyons with asphalt surfaces, grasslands and broad-leaved trees. The ENVI-met model was validated against human-biometeorological measurements and demonstrated good performance when simulating the urban thermal environment in terms of air temperature (Ta) and human heat stress in terms of mean radiant temperature (Tmrt) and physiologically equivalent temperature (PET). Simulations were performed for the heat wave day of 4 August 2003, which is a typical scenario for future summer weather in Central Europe as projected by climate models. Four scenarios with different types of green coverage were simulated. The results enable quantification of the daytime and nocturnal contributions of trees and grasslands, respectively, to the mitigation of human heat stress on different spatial scales. Averaged over 10-16 CET, trees on grasslands lead to a mitigation effect up to 2.7K for Ta, 39.1K for Tmrt and 17.4K for PET. In comparison, the effect of grasslands can be up to 3.4K for Ta, 7.5K for Tmrt and 4.9K for PET. Based on the findings, design implications are also provided from the perspective of urban human-biometeorology.
Whiteness and Urban Planning Goetz, Edward G.; Williams, Rashad A.; Damiano, Anthony
Journal of the American Planning Association,
04/2020, Letnik:
86, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Problem, research strategy, and findings: The ability of planning to address America's urban problems of inequality, crime, housing, education, and segregation is hampered by a relative neglect of ...Whiteness and its role in shaping urban outcomes. We offer a justification for centering Whiteness within urban planning scholarship and practice that would examine its role shaping and perpetuating regional and racial injustices in the American city. The focus of planners, scholars, and public discourse on the "dysfunctions" of communities of color, notably poverty, high levels of segregation, and isolation, diverts attention from the structural systems that produce and reproduce the advantages of affluent and White neighborhoods. Planners and planning scholars frequently invoke a "legacy of injustice" with regard to concentrated poverty and disadvantage but not in regard to neighborhoods of White affluence. One is segregated and problematized and the other is idealized.
Takeaway for practice: Planners and planning scholars need to understand the role of Whiteness, in particular White affluence, to assess the potential impacts of planning interventions. Doing so will inform a wider range of planning approaches to problems of racial and spatial equity.
•The idea of the smart city is ambiguous, as there are multiple meanings.•Citizenship is evolving, becoming more and more tied to the urban scale.•Four imaginaries of smart urbanism are explored, ...questioning the position of citizens.•All the considered imaginaries locate citizens in a subaltern position.•Smart city visions are largely disconnected from social needs and aspirations.
Imagining tomorrow’s life implies, to a large degree, imagining the kind of cities we will inhabit in the future. In this framework, the smart city is actually a popular vision in discourses on urban development. This paper explores alternative ways in which citizens are positioned within different imaginaries of the smart city. The premise is that most mainstream discourses implicitly assume that smart city projects will empower and improve the lives of citizens. However, their role is often ambiguous. While some visions of the smart city are characterised by the absence of citizen’s voices, others are populated by active citizens operating as urban sensors. Furthermore there are fearful visions of a future in which citizens will be subjugated by technologies that will hamper their freedom. This paper analyses the role of citizens in four alternative smart city imaginaries. The thesis proposed is that all four imaginaries are characterised by citizens playing a subaltern role, and hence the smart city is a relatively poor concept if intended as a model of the urban life of the future.
•We examine the impact of green infrastructure on perceptions of urban sites.•Photo simulation is used in combination with subjective wellbeing measures.•Green infrastructure increases the happiness ...people associate with urban spaces.•Green infrastructure decreases the stress people associate with urban spaces.•Green infrastructure increases people’s perceptions of the safety of urban spaces.•The magnitude of the impacts increase with the scale of the intervention.
Research using subjective wellbeing (SWB) measures finds that the greener an individual’s local environment is, the higher the levels of happiness and the lower levels of stress they tend to report experiencing. This literature presents positive associations between existing large-scale green spaces, such as urban parks or squares, and the wellbeing of residents living in close proximity to them. In contrast, in the current work, we present a novel approach which combines SWB measures with photo simulation in order to examine the impact of street-level green infrastructure interventions on the people's perceptions of the SWB associated with urban sites. We tested the approach with the attendees of the 20th Biennale on Architecture and Urbanism in Chile in 2017, exploring the impact of four different types of street-level green interventions. The results indicate that all types of green interventions considered significantly increase the perceived happiness and reduce the perceived stress associated with the sites during short exposures, with varying effect sizes across different types and scales of interventions. The proposed technique could be used in urban planning processes to examine the potential SWB benefits of green infrastructure investments prior to their being rolled out.
Rural tourism in China is flourishing, largely credited by the scholars in China to the national government's stimulating policies and emphasis on rural regeneration. Against this backdrop and given ...the scarce literature on the government as a critical stakeholder in rural tourism, this study examines the roles of Chinese central- and local-level governments in rural tourism development. We analyzed both secondary data sourced from government documents and primary data collected through interviews with local government employees and residents at a rural destination in China. The results indicate that the central government plays a steering role in guiding rural tourism towards desired directions, and the local government plays a serving role by directly managing tourism practices and coordinating with businesses and residents to provide services and solve problems. The synergistic interaction of the central and local governments in China stimulates the rapid development of rural tourism.
•The central and local governments coordinate with each other to promote rural tourism development.•The central government plays a steering role in rural tourism development.•The local government plays a serving role in rural tourism development.•Public administration concepts are integrated into the model of Chinese government role in rural tourism.
This thematic dossier of the journal CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios proposes a space for reflection and discussion, national or international, of housing and habitat, focusing particularly on the ...“influence and implications of urban design in territorial, social, economic and environmental sustainability”, a mighty long subtitle that aims to express the complex and multifold aspects that need to be contemplated when approaching the habitat notion. We live in a time when the importance of ...
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