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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
"In Green Cities, Matthew Kahn surveys the burgeoning economic literature on the environmental consequences of urban growth. He discusses the environmental Kuznets curve, which theorizes that the relationship between environmental quality and per capita income follows a bell-shaped curve. The heart of the book unpacks and expands this notion by tracing the environmental effects of economic growth, population growth, and suburban sprawl. Kahn considers how cities can deal with the environmental challenges produced by growth. His concluding chapter addresses the role of cities in promoting climate change and asks how cities in turn are likely to be affected by this trend."--BOOK JACKET.
The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 cities in Europe and North America over a 20-year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries and on the analysis of core planning, policy and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies. The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening are not only physical but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning—a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities that prioritize equity in green access, in secure housing and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.
A team of city-building professionals explain in straightforward terms how the idea of ecological sustainability can be embodied in the everyday life of homes, communities and cities to make a better future.The book considers - and answers - three questions: What does the global agenda of sustainable development mean for the urban spaces where most
Smart Green Cities: is a comprehensive overview of what global cities are doing to become sustainable. Woodrow W. Clark II and Grant Cooke have produced a book that is both practical and visionary. They have examined the infrastructure needs - sustainable development, communications, energy, water, waste, and transportation to develop guidelines, processes and best practices. City leaders are key to mitigating climate change who must plan, design and implement solutions. Smart Green Cities (SGC) offers a global perspective that includes implementing the Green Industrial Revolution the title of their last book. SGC discusses innovative emerging technologies, and the new economics paradigm that move beyond the out-dated neo-classical economics. The authors present examples from around the world including Europe, the U.S, China and the Middle East, which discuss the best green technologies from renewable energy power generation to smart on-site grid development. The extraordinary shift from a rural to an urban world is described; national plans are analyzed; so that future cities will be designed, built and implemented now - not 50 years from now. The struggle for the planet’s survival is being waged by the world’s cities. Clark and Cooke argue that cities are the key to mitigating climate change and reducing toxic greenhouse gas emissions. SGC introduces sustainable technologies; discusses the economics for implementing the solutions; and offers numerous examples to serve as pathways for cities to become smart, green, and thus carbon neutral.
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.
In the absence of federal leadership, states and localities are stepping forward to address critical problems like climate change, urban sprawl, and polluted water and air. Making a city fundamentally sustainable is a daunting task, but fortunately, there are dynamic, innovative models outside U.S. borders. Green Cities of Europe draws on the world's best examples of sustainability to show how other cities can become greener and more livable. Timothy Beatley has brought together leading experts from Paris, Freiburg, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Heidelberg, Venice, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and London to illustrate groundbreaking practices in sustainable urban planning and design. These cities are developing strong urban cores, building pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and improving public transit. They are incorporating ecological design and planning concepts, from solar energy to natural drainage and community gardens. And they are changing the way government works, instituting municipal "green audits" and reforming economic incentives to encourage sustainability. Whatever their specific tactics, these communities prove that a holistic approach is needed to solve environmental problems and make cities sustainable. Beatley and these esteemed contributors offer vital lessons to the domestic planning community about not only what European cities are doing to achieve that vision, but precisely how they are doing it. The result is an indispensable guide to greening American cities. Contributors include: Lucie Laurian (Paris) Dale Medearis and Wulf Daseking (Freiburg) Michaela Brüel (Copenhagen) Maria Jaakkola (Helsinki) Marta Moretti (Venice) Luis Andrés Orive and Rebeca Dios Lema (Vitoria-Gasteiz) Camilla Ween (London)
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.
This volume bridges the gap between the global promotion of the Green Economy and the manifestation of this new development strategy at the urban level. Green cities are an imperative solution, not only in meeting global environmental challenges but also in helping to ensure socio-economic prosperity at the local level.
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.