The Hidden Wealth of Cities

The Hidden Wealth of Cities
Author: Jon Kher Kaw
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2020-02-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464814937

Download The Hidden Wealth of Cities Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In every city, the urban spaces that form the public realm—ranging from city streets, neighborhood squares, and parks to public facilities such as libraries and markets—account for about one-third of the city’s total land area, on average. Despite this significance, the potential for these public-space assets—typically owned and managed by local governments—to transform urban life and city functioning is often overlooked for many reasons: other pressing city priorities arising from rapid urbanization, poor urban planning, and financial constraints. The resulting degradation of public spaces into congested, vehicle-centric, and polluted places often becomes a liability, creating a downward spiral that leads to a continuous drain on public resources and exacerbating various city problems. In contrast, the cities that invest in the creation of human-centered, environmentally sustainable, economically vibrant, and socially inclusive places—in partnership with government entities, communities, and other private stakeholders—perform better. They implement smart and sustainable strategies across their public space asset life cycles to yield returns on investment far exceeding monetary costs, ultimately enhancing city livability, resilience, and competitiveness. The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces discusses the complexities that surround the creation and management of successful public spaces and draws on the analyses and experiences from city case studies from around the globe. This book identifies—through the lens of asset management—a rich palette of creative and innovative strategies that every city can undertake to plan, finance, and manage both government-owned and privately owned public spaces.

Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility

Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility
Author: van Melik, Rianne
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529219000

Download Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19, both those resulting from official governmental regulations and from everyday practices of urban citizens. The contributors discuss how the virus made urban inequalities clearer, and redefined public spaces in the “new normal”.

Contesting Public Spaces

Contesting Public Spaces
Author: Ed Wall
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2022-06-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000596354

Download Contesting Public Spaces Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

Equitable Public Space

Equitable Public Space
Author: Margot Chalmers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Community development, Urban
ISBN:

Download Equitable Public Space Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking

The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking
Author: Cara Courage
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000319601

Download The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This Handbook is the first to explore the emergent field of ‘placemaking’ in terms of the recent research, teaching and learning, and practice agenda for the next few years. Offering valuable theoretical and practical insights from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, it provides cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the placemaking sector. Placemaking has seen a paradigmatic shift in urban design, planning, and policy to engage the community voice. This Handbook examines the development of placemaking, its emerging theories, and its future directions. The book is structured in seven distinct sections curated by experts in the areas concerned. Section One provides a glimpse at the history and key theories of placemaking and its interpretations by different community sectors. Section Two studies the transformative potential of placemaking practice through case studies on different places, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. It also reveals placemaking’s potential to nurture a holistic community engagement, social justice, and human-centric urban environments. Section Three looks at the politics of placemaking to consider who is included and who is excluded from its practice and if the concept of placemaking needs to be reconstructed. Section Four deals with the scales and scopes of art-based placemaking, moving from the city to the neighborhood and further to the individual practice. It juxtaposes the voice of the practitioner and professional alongside that of the researcher and academic. Section Five tackles the socio-economic and environmental placemaking issues deemed pertinent to emerge more sustainable placemaking practices. Section Six emphasizes placemaking’s intersection with urban design and planning sectors and incudes case studies of generative planning practice. The final seventh section draws on the expertise of placemakers, researchers, and evaluators to present the key questions today, new methods and approaches to evaluation of placemaking in related fields, and notions for the future of evaluation practices. Each section opens with an introduction to help the reader navigate the text. This organization of the book considers the sectors that operate alongside the core placemaking practice. This seminal Handbook offers a timely contribution and international perspectives for the growing field of placemaking. It will be of interest to academics and students of placemaking, urban design, urban planning and policy, architecture, geography, cultural studies, and the arts.

Cities for Life

Cities for Life
Author: Jason Corburn
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642831727

Download Cities for Life Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.

The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People

The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People
Author: Janet Loebach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 596
Release: 2020-06-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429012810

Download The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People is a thorough and practical resource for all who wish to influence policy and design decisions in order to increase young people’s access to and use of public spaces, as well as their role in design and decision-making processes. The ability of youth to freely enjoy public spaces, and to develop a sense of belonging and attachment to these environments, is critical for their physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Young people represent a vital citizen group with legitimate rights to occupy and shape their public environments, yet they are often driven out of public places by adult users, restrictive bylaws, or hostile designs. It is also important that children and youth have the opportunity to genuinely participate in the planning of public spaces, and to have their needs considered in the design of the public realm. This book provides both evidence and tools to help effectively advocate for more youth-inclusive public environments, as well as integrate youth directly into both research and design processes related to the public realm. It is essential reading for researchers, design and planning professionals, community leaders, and youth advocates.

Why Public Space Matters

Why Public Space Matters
Author: Setha M. Low
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197543731

Download Why Public Space Matters Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Public spaces are vital to a healthy civic life. Even fleeting interactions in such places tend to expand people's horizons. Sidewalks, plazas, public parks, central squares, and public libraries all enhance public life in unique ways. Yet, as Setha Low details in Why Public Space Matters, we are losing public spaces to urban development and the belief that public spaces are expendable. Just as important is the broad and ongoing corporate privatization of public space. This book explores why public spaces are so vitally important today and what we can do about protecting these essential places.

Equitable Improvements to Public Space in the Right-of-way

Equitable Improvements to Public Space in the Right-of-way
Author: Chase Killebrew
Publisher:
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

Download Equitable Improvements to Public Space in the Right-of-way Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

As one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, Seattle is quickly losing its potential public open space. The need to create more public space with its increasing population will only intensify. The benefits of green space and more generally public space to public healthy and overall community well-being are widely known. Cities have been trying to deal with the lack of access a percentage of their populations has to public open space, especially since that percentage tends to be made up of minority and low-income populations. One potential solution to the declining public open space lies within the public right-of-way (ROW). ROW is publicly owned and supports the movement of people, goods, and services. It can serve as a vital resource with potential to be repurposed into successful public space. In Seattle, the ROW makes up 27 percent of the total land, and a large portion is currently underused, in terms of the benefits it could provide to the public. This thesis examines three Seattle Department of Transportation ROW programs that seek to encourage public space within the ROW. These programs are significant assets yet there is a distinct lack of participation in them within minority and low-income areas of the city. Through a study of the relevant literature, precedents from other American cities, and a geospatial analysis, I provide recommendations for making these programs more equitable to foster more meaningful public space within Seattle’s ROW.

Communities in Action

Communities in Action
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309452961

Download Communities in Action Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.