Sustainable Urban Development Issues Research Articles

The Core Stakeholders’ Identification and Analysis of Community Micro-Renewal Based on the Chinese Context

Urban renewal has become an important issue of sustainable urban development, and community micro-renewal is the basis of urban renewal. More and more grassroots governments begin to pay attention to and introduce policies to guide the development of community micro renewal. Considering the actual situation in China, based on the stakeholder theory, this paper analyzes the characteristics and composition of the core stakeholders from three dimensions: environmental improvement, space building, and infrastructure construction, as well as their role in the community micro-renewal, aiming to provide the basis for the relevant government departments to correctly understand the demands of different stakeholders and create suitable policies.

Applications of Local Climate Zone Classification Scheme to Improve Urban Sustainability: A Bibliometric Review

Many of the sustainable urban development issues, such as human heath, energy consumption, carbon emission, are related to the climate of cities. As a result, research insights gained in urban climate study can be applied to improve urban sustainability. Although the Local Climate Zones (LCZ) scheme was originally proposed to provide a standardized classification of landscapes to study urban air temperature, its use was not limited to the study of urban heat islands. This study explores the applications of LCZ scheme in various research domains by conducting a bibliometric analysis in CiteSpace on over 800 articles that cites the original article of LCZ. These articles cover a wide range of research categories including meteorology, atmospheric science, environmental science, remote sensing, building technology, civil engineering, ecology, urban studies, etc. The LCZ scheme facilitates urban climate data collection by refining monitoring network, providing reasonable modelling input, and improving database documentation. In addition to the study of urban heat islands, the LCZ scheme was applied in studies of urban thermal comfort, human health, building energy consumption, and carbon emission. The diffusion of the LCZ scheme to other research domains offers an example that the development of urban climate research advances sustainable urban development. This review provides insights of multidisciplinary studies related to urban climate for policy-makers, urban specialists, architects, ecologists, and others.

Education towards Urban Sustainability: Lessons Learned from the Welfare Business Models of Kanazawa City, Japan

AbstractEducation is considered a driving force for urban sustainable development and there is an urgent need to use different approaches to increase the awareness level in younger generations. Teaching about sustainability requires an integrated approach due to its complex concept, and in this study to show the interconnection of the social, environmental and economic sectors of the city the author decided to conduct fieldwork activities in the welfare business sectors, which is one of the leading practices used in the aging Japanese population. Japan’s population is aging with a declining birth rate, and the country is becoming a “super-aging” society with one out of every four persons aged above 65 years. There are crucial issues to provide social services, such as care for the elderly, child support programmes to reduce the child-raising anxieties, care for mentally and physically disabled people and others. In this study, the objectives were 1) to provide the fieldwork in small-scaled private and town-scaled business sectors and 2) to observe the interconnection of urban sustainability practices through the welfare with environmental, social and economic sectors. Private and public sectors were visited by 15 international students with different educational backgrounds, who had no idea about urban sustainability. In total, four welfare business sectors were visited by the students: two sectors were related to the farming activates together with care for disabled people, and the other two field trips were related to urban community-development business sectors. After the field trips, students evaluated a linkage among social, environmental and business sectors related with welfare practices. The awareness level of the students increased (85 %) towards the issue of sustainable urban development, and they were able to provide the recommendations for the inclusive, safe and resilient cities. These field trips showed very positive feedback, to educate the youth. In this study, the author presents the qualitative transdisciplinary field trip approach. However, to improve the methodology a cohort analysis with a quantitative data analysis will be performed in the further study.

Urban studies and the challenge of embedding sustainability: A review of international master programmes

The United Nations declaration of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UN DESD, 2004–2014) advocates the need for universities to embed sustainability in all learning areas. This inquiry examines how selected post-graduate top-level programmes in urban studies are adapting their curricula to promote sustainable urban development. We start by reviewing an extensive literature to identify the principles and practices characterising the UN DESD, and to identify the topics and themes considered essential for teaching aimed at the promotion of sustainable urban development. Based on the extensive literature review we define an analytical framework in five parts, related to various aspects of curricular content and teaching and learning approaches: programme orientation, skills, ethics and critical reasoning, interdisciplinarity and content related to sustainable urban development issues. We then conduct an empirical study of 25 among the best post-graduate level (MA and MSc) programmes in urban studies from Europe, China, the USA and the Global South, to see how they are adapting their curricula to the requirements of sustainable urban development captured in the analytical framework. While acknowledging the significant context specificities that must be respected, and the multiple challenges that must be reconciled when defining urban studies curricula - we find both strengths and weaknesses in these top programmes, including important differences among the programmes from the four regions. Our data suggests that important steps are being taken towards ‘whole-system’ transformation envisaged by the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, but also that transformative factors depending on cultural and institutional values and practices remain relatively weak.

The issue of sustainable urban development in a neoliberal age. Discursive entanglements and disputes

The city of Oslo, the Norwegian capital, is in the midst of executing a huge urban waterfront project in Bjørvika. This project has triggered several years of public debate. A key concept in the development project is “sustainable development”, but it is unclear what the concept implies. Several interests are involved which emphasise different goals and different values. In this article, a discourse analysis of the concept, in this particular context, is conducted. Five discourses are identified, which overlap as well as collide. Special attention is paid to how the respective discourses are related to a neoliberal form of government, and as part of the analysis, a discussion of how cultural heritage is used to increase the city’s attractiveness is undertaken. This article concludes that planning for a sustainable use of cultural heritage should imply establishing a reflective cultural policy not subsumed under economic sustainability.

Analyzing Societal Circumstances, Sustainability and Sustainable Urban Development: New Theoretical and Methodological Challenges

This article reviews the development of social quality indicators and the challenges ahead. First, through a review of recent Asian and Australian work carried out on social quality indicators, and the World Bank related work on “social development indicators,” the article argues that social quality indicators research should move beyond the empirical level of particular policy areas. Therefore, it should be guided by a clear methodological perspective regarding the role of indicators as part of a social quality theory (SQT) and their relation to the social quality approach (SQA). Second, the article opens a debate about the rationale behind distinguishing between three different functions of social quality indicators. Indicators should address the change in the conditional factors in daily life, as manifested in its economic, socio-political, socio-cultural and environmental dimensions, in order to examine the consequences of general trends and contradictions in (1) societal circumstances, (2) the development (or lack of development) toward sustainability, and (3) the related issue of sustainable urban development. Before 2010 social quality scholars mainly concentrated on the first issue. Recently, however, they are approaching all three issues. It is essential to delve deeper into SQT and the SQA for understanding these three issues separately and integrally. This has implications for the nature of social quality indicators and their comparison to those of other mainstream approaches; the article introduces this agenda of work.

Integrated urban microclimate assessment method as a sustainable urban development and urban design tool

In the past decades, urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon in the city and its corresponding issues including the mitigation methods have become the main research topics in the area of urban climatology. Researchers have conducted various investigations and measurements in the urban environment. Prediction models such as impact mitigation strategies, urban air temperature predictions, improved weather forecasting and air quality forecasting have been developed as a result. With the current issue of sustainable urban development in the cities, urban planners are beginning to look into different aspects of urban climatic parameters and incorporate them as the design parameters. However, it is rather difficult for the planners to attempt to design without engaging the urban climate scientists. Presently, Geographical Information System (GIS) is a platform commonly used in various geographical related research and applications, including those relating to urban climate research, as it can be used to analyze different urban climatic parameters. Although it is, by all standards, an appropriate urban design tool, urban planners tend not to embrace this technology. This paper shall present an idea to overcome this challenge by means of developing a user friendly urban design platform that takes after GIS. This paper will also discuss the plan for advancement of the urban design tool from the current situation to the future.

Society, energy and materials: the contribution of urban metabolism studies to sustainable urban development issues

Urban areas, in particular cities, are significant consumers of materials and energy, either directly on their land areas or indirectly through the materials, goods and services they import or export; there are upstream and downstream consequences of the removal of resources and the discharge of waste materials (to the atmosphere, water and soils), with multiple impacts on the biosphere. The processes involved need to be better characterised to reduce these environmental pressures. This is a sustainable development issue and it is a major goal of a field ecology which has been described as urban, industrial or sometimes territorial. This paper reviews the specific origins and findings of studies on urban metabolism. It describes the analysis tools used, including material and substance flows, energy balances, ecological, water and, more generally, environmental footprints. Finally, recent findings and areas for future research in the dematerialisation of urban societies are summarised.

Sustainable Urban Development Issues in Chinese Transitional Cities: Hong Kong and Shenzhen

Post-colonial capitalist Hong Kong and rapidly developing Shenzhen in China's socialist market economy have both adopted a pro-growth strategy to cope with challenges imposed by a globalizing economy. This development philosophy has exerted tremendous pressure on both cities, pushing them further away from the path of sustainable urban development. Despite the policy rhetoric of pursuing sustainable development, both city governments have refrained from identifying and analysing sustainable urban development issues. While the top-down elite-dominated polities in Hong Kong and Shenzhen are working hard to attain world city status, both cities lack a sustainable development strategy. Without a critical rethink of the growth-first mentality, sustainability principles such as an ethical utilization of natural resources and aspirations for intra- and inter-generational equity are not put on the policy agenda. Despite recent efforts to clean up the environment, it is uncertain how these two growing cities will proceed as the global economy itself is starting to capitalize on sustainability efforts to further capital accumulation.