The Place of Urban Forestry in our Viable Urban Futures: A Cosmetic or a Metaphysic?

Urban Futures

10.3362/9781780446325 ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Nabeel Hamdi ◽

Jane Handal

Keyword(s):

Urban Futures

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Policies and politics in urban forestry: involving citizens in municipal urban forestry initiatives

10.31274/etd-180810-861 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Kalpana Bhattacharjee

Keyword(s):

Urban Forestry

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Smart and Resilient Urban Futures for Sustainability in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Review of Policy Responses on Urban Mobility

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13116486 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (11) ◽

pp. 6486

Author(s):

Christina Kakderi ◽

Eleni Oikonomaki ◽

Ilektra Papadaki

Keyword(s):

Operations Management ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Smart Growth ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Sustainable Mobility ◽

Health Crisis ◽

Daily Routines ◽

Policy Responses ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Made In

The COVID-19 pandemic has put lifestyles in question, changed daily routines, and limited citizen freedoms that seemed inalienable before. A human activity that has been greatly affected since the beginning of the health crisis is mobility. Focusing on mobility, we aim to discuss the transformational impact that the pandemic brought to this specific urban domain, especially with regards to the promotion of sustainability, the smart growth agenda, and the acceleration towards the smart city paradigm. We collect 60 initial policy responses related to urban mobility from cities around the world and analyze them based on the challenge they aim to address, the exact principles of smart growth and sustainable mobility that they encapsulate, as well as the level of ICT penetration. Our findings suggest that emerging strategies, although mainly temporary, are transformational, in line with the principles of smart growth and sustainable development. Most policy responses adopted during the first months of the pandemic, however, fail to leverage advancements made in the field of smart cities, and to adopt off-the-shelf solutions such as monitoring, alerting, and operations management.

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Urban specters

Environment and Planning D Society and Space ◽

10.1177/02637758211030286 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 026377582110302

Author(s):

Asha Best ◽

Margaret M Ramírez

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Black Women ◽

Urban Space ◽

Women Artists ◽

Social Life ◽

The United States ◽

Spatial Method ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Black Life ◽

The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

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Out of the loop? On the radical and the routine in urban big data

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/00420980211014026 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 004209802110140

Author(s):

Sarah Barns

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Big Data ◽

Computational Models ◽

Data Driven ◽

Urban Systems ◽

Out Of The Loop ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Urban Behaviour ◽

The City

This commentary interrogates what it means for routine urban behaviours to now be replicating themselves computationally. The emergence of autonomous or artificial intelligence points to the powerful role of big data in the city, as increasingly powerful computational models are now capable of replicating and reproducing existing spatial patterns and activities. I discuss these emergent urban systems of learned or trained intelligence as being at once radical and routine. Just as the material and behavioural conditions that give rise to urban big data demand attention, so do the generative design principles of data-driven models of urban behaviour, as they are increasingly put to use in the production of replicable, autonomous urban futures.

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Beijing Resident’s Preferences of Ecosystem Services of Urban Forests

Forests ◽

10.3390/f12010014 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 14

Author(s):

Han Zhi-Ying ◽

Youn Yeo-Chang

Keyword(s):

Ecosystem Services ◽

Air Quality ◽

Fresh Water ◽

Urban Forest ◽

Urban Forestry ◽

Urban Forests ◽

Wildlife Habitat ◽

Quality Regulation ◽

Water Provision ◽

Air Quality Regulation

This paper aims to investigate the Beijing resident’s preferences over various options of urban forest management strategies. The literature investigation and expert Delphi method were conducted to classify the ecosystem services of urban forests into six categories: (1) fresh water provision, (2) noise reduction, (3) moderation of extreme events, (4) air quality regulation, (5) species diversity and wildlife habitat, and (6) recreation and spiritual experience. To elicit the relative preferences to ecosystem service (hereafter referred to as ES) of Beijing residents, we employed the choice experiment method. The data were collected by interviews with questionnaires conducted in October 2017, and a total of 483 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The subjects of this experiment were residents older than 19 years old who have lived in Beijing for more than 1 year and have visited any one of the urban forests located in Beijing more than once during 2016. The results were as follows: Firstly, the air quality regulation ES was considered as the most important service for Beijing residents in terms of their choices of urban forest. In addition, Beijing residents regarded the fresh water provision ES as the second most important ES. Beijing residents were willing to pay up to 1.84% of the average monthly income of Chinese households annually to expand urban forest ecosystems in order to improve air quality. Secondly, apartment owners were willing to pay more municipality tax for forest ESs than residents who did not own an apartment. Thirdly, residents were more willing to pay for urban forest ESs as their income increases. The results indicated that Beijing residents were willing to pay more tax in support of urban forestry for air quality improvement. This research suggests that urban environmental policy makers in Beijing should pay more attention to the regulation function of forests (especially improving air quality) when designing and managing urban forests.

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