[PDF] How Green Is Your City eBook

Author : Warren Karlenzig
Publisher :
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 34,43 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN :

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In our peak oil, post-Katrina world, how do America's largest cities stack up in terms of sustainability? Which cities are more self-sufficient and better-prepared for our uncertain future, and which cities are operating business-as-usual? How Green is Your City? examines the outcome of a sustainability study of the 50 largest U.S. cities, compiled by SustainLane. The 2006 SustainLane US Cities Rankings employed 15 standards to measure each city's performance and ranked them overall according to the cumulative results. Among those standards: Public transit use Air and tap water quality Planning/land use City innovation Affordability Energy/climate change policy Local food/agriculture Green economy Sustainability management Leading the pack is Portland, Oregon, with its high quality of life and commitment to green building, local food, alternative fuels and renewable energy, while Columbus, Ohio, with its dependence on the automobile and poor public transit, ranks at the bottom. How Green is Your City? offers an in-depth analysis of each city's management policies, strengths and challenges, as well as the emerging job and tax base expansion opportunities with the growth of clean technologies. How Green is Your City? will appeal to city planners, legislators, green businesses, as well as anyone interested in their quality of life and making their city a more sustainable place. SustainLane.us was designed as an online open-source knowledge base devoted to government officials, while Sustainlane.com is for reviews in the green and healthy product market. Author Warren Karlenzig, along with Frank Marquardt, Paula White, Rachel Yaseen and Richard Young of SustainLane.com contributed to this project.

Author : Dimitri Devuyst
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 486 pages
File Size : 24,53 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0231118031

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This book deals with practical ways to reach a more sustainable state in urban areas through such tools as strategic environmental assessment, sustainability assessment, direction analysis, baseline setting and progress measurement, sustainability targets, and ecological footprint analysis.

Author : David Owen
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 27,44 MB
Release : 2009-09-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1101140313

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Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes. A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

Author : Allan Drummond
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 45 pages
File Size : 37,22 MB
Release : 2016-03-15
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 0374379998

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In 2007, a tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, and the residents were at a loss as to what to do next--they didn't want to rebuild if their small town would just be destroyed in another storm. So they decided they wouldn't just rebuild the same old thing; this time, they would build a town that could not only survive another storm, but one that was built in an environmentally sustainable way. Told from the point of view of a child whose family rebuilt after the storm, this companion to Energy Island is the inspiring story of the difference one community can make--and it includes plenty of rebuilding scenes and details for construction lovers, too

Author : Joseph S. Cialdella
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 27,24 MB
Release : 2020-03-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0822987023

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Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues that Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality. As the city’s social landscape became increasingly uncontrollable, Detroiters turned to parks, gardens, yards, and other outdoor spaces to relieve the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how today’s urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city’s past.

Author : Hillary Angelo
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 17,47 MB
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226738994

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As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

Author : Nevin Cohen
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 577 pages
File Size : 49,19 MB
Release : 2010-05-04
Category : Reference
ISBN : 1452266204

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Via 150 signed articles, Green Cities: An A-to-Z Guide provides an overview of the key concepts that urban planners, policy makers, architects, engineers, and developers use to understand the sustainability dimensions of the urban environment. It identifies cities that have taken steps to become greener and discusses the strategies they have used; it also reviews broad concepts associated with green cities. Cities face enormous environmental challenges, and the entries in this volume, from case studies of greener cities to discussions of green urban design, infrastructure, and processes, can help us transform our cities into healthier, sustainable communities in which a growing urban population can thrive. Vivid photographs, searchable hyperlinks, numerous cross references, an extensive resource guide, and a clear, accessible writing style make the Green Society volumes ideal for classroom use as well as for research.

Author : Dorothee Brantz
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 12,34 MB
Release : 2011-07-01
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 081393138X

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The modern city is not only pavement and concrete. Parks, gardens, trees, and other plants are an integral part of the urban environment. Often the focal points of social movements and political interests, green spaces represent far more than simply an effort to balance the man-made with the natural. A city’s history with—and approach to—its parks and gardens reveals much about its workings and the forces acting upon it. Our green spaces offer a unique and valuable window on the history of city life. The essays in Greening the City span over a century of urban history, moving from fin-de-siècle Sofia to green efforts in urban Seattle. The authors present a wide array of cases that speak to global concerns through the local and specific, with topics that include green-space planning in Barcelona and Mexico City, the distinction between public and private nature in Los Angeles, the ecological diversity of West Berlin, and the historical and cultural significance of hybrid spaces designed for sports. The essays collected here will make us think differently about how we study cities, as well as how we live in them. Contributors: Dorothee Brantz, Technische Universität Berlin * Peter Clark, University of Helsinki * Lawrence Culver, Utah State University * Konstanze Sylva Domhardt, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich * Sonja Dümpelmann, University of Maryland * Zachary J. S. Falck, Independent Scholar* Stefanie Hennecke, Technical University Munich * Sonia Hirt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University * Salla Jokela, University of Helsinki * Jens Lachmund, Maastricht University * Gary McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College * Jarmo Saarikivi, University of Helsinki * Jeffrey Craig Sanders, Washington State University

Author : Eugenie L. Birch
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 50,89 MB
Release : 2011-09-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0812204093

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Nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted described his most famous project, the design of New York's Central Park, as "a democratic development of highest significance." Over the years, the significance of green in civic life has grown. In twenty-first-century America, not only open space but also other issues of sustainability—such as potable water and carbon footprints—have become crucial elements in the quality of life in the city and surrounding environment. Confronted by a U.S. population that is more than 70 percent urban, growing concern about global warming, rising energy prices, and unabated globalization, today's decision makers must find ways to bring urban life into balance with the Earth in order to sustain the natural, economic, and political environment of the modern city. In Growing Greener Cities, a collection of essays on urban sustainability and environmental issues edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, scholars and practitioners alike promote activities that recognize and conserve nature's ability to sustain urban life. These essays demonstrate how partnerships across professional organizations, businesses, advocacy groups, governments, and individuals themselves can bring green solutions to cities from London to Seattle. Beyond park and recreational spaces, initiatives that fall under the green umbrella range from public transit and infrastructure improvement to aquifer protection and urban agriculture. Growing Greener Cities offers an overview of the urban green movement, case studies in effective policy implementation, and tools for measuring and managing success. Thoroughly illustrated with color graphs, maps, and photographs, Growing Greener Cities provides a panoramic view of urban sustainability and environmental issues for green-minded city planners, policy makers, and citizens.

Author : Viniece Jennings
Publisher : Springer
Page : 102 pages
File Size : 42,39 MB
Release : 2019-03-28
Category : Science
ISBN : 3030104699

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This book crosses disciplinary boundaries to investigate how the benefits of green spaces can be further incorporated in public health. In this regard, the book highlights how ecosystem services provided by green spaces affect multiple aspects of human health and well-being, offering a strategic way to conceptualize the topic. For centuries, scholars have observed the range of health benefits associated with exposure to nature. As people continue to move to urban areas, it is essential to include green spaces in cities to ensure sustained human health and well-being. Such insights can not only advance the science but also spark interdisciplinary research and help researchers creatively translate their findings into benefits for the public. The book explores this topic in the context of ‘big picture’ frameworks that enhance communication between the environmental, public health, and social sciences.