Urban Regions : Ecology And Planning Beyond The...
With land planning, socioeconomics and natural systems as foundations, this book combines urban planning and ecological science in examining urban regions. Writing for graduate students, academic researchers, planners, conservationists and policy makers, and with the use of informative urban-region color maps, Richard Forman analyzes 38 urban regions from 32 nations, including London, Chicago, Ottawa, Brasilia, Cairo, Seoul, Bangkok, Canberra, and a major case study of the Greater Barcelona region. Alternative patterns of urbanization spread (including sprawl) are evaluated from the perspective of nature and people, stating land-use principles extracted from landscape ecology, transportation and hydrology. Good, bad and interesting spatial patterns for creating sustainable land mosaics are pinpointed, and urban regions are considered in broader contexts, from climate change to biodiversity loss, disasters and sense of place.
Urban Regions : Ecology and Planning Beyond the...
The book offers some hope to reconciling this disconnect and opportunity of a urban focuses ecology that is interdisciplinary in order to better approach our current complexity of the modern city. More on this as i delve into the chapters in depth.
The fact that these amenable places differ from regions where population growth is most rapid raises the issue of whether migration to more suitable areas will increase, especially as the impacts of climate change hit harder. Most people prefer to stay in their own nation. The costs of migration are high: breaking cultural and social ties, transport and rebuilding of communities and infrastructure. But staying put becomes less feasible as a population becomes more dense and environmental resources more limited. As the flight of refugees from today's Middle Eastern conflicts shows, the migration of tens or hundreds of thousands of people will challenge communities along the travel routes as well as in the source and recipient regions, which are mainly urban.
And there are alternatives to settling more suitable regions. For instance, we could move everyone into compact cities; pump more water from deeper wells and aquifers; build thousands of desalinization facilities; apply agricultural genetics to accelerate food production; or let climate warming turn boreal forest into farmland. But such ideas will be unsuccessful in the long term without widespread land, water and urban planning.
Global-scale land planning and human migration issues should be linked to international agreements on water stress, clean water and environmental degradation. The source and target areas of human migration should receive particular attention. Such agreements might highlight groundwater quantity and quality in urban regions; riverside or floodplain protection; and development and irrigation in areas needed to protect water supplies for cities. Immigration policies should encourage development and growth in environmentally suitable regions.
National governments must put teeth into policies mandating urban region plans. Funding for planning, implementation and measuring progress should be allocated by the different levels of government and beneficiaries.
Urban region planning requires a new mix of expertise. Essential are experts in: ecosystem and landscape ecology, water quantity and quality, agricultural soil quality and productivity, economics, transportation infrastructure engineering and community development. International agencies, non-governmental organizations, academics and professionals should step forward with case studies, examples, models and new projects. Major universities should establish multisector urban region planning units to develop models and initiatives.
Series of thirty-six 8"x10" study drawings in watercolor and ink created for landscape ecology education in preparation for my 2014 Trifecta Editions' Artist Residency at Eagle Lake, NY. This mixed media series reinterprets diagrams from Richard TT Forman's Harvard Graduate School of Design class lectures, field trips and publication: Land Mosaics, The ecology of landscapes and regions, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006. All text, unless noted otherwise, by Richard TT Forman.
It has been argued that spatial mismatches are generally more pronounced in urban landscapes than other social-ecological systems (Borgström et al. 2006, Ernstson et al. 2010). The intensive, patchy, and changing land use in urbanized regions poses a fundamental challenge to planners, who need to carefully evaluate the effects of new development plans in order to maintain ecological connectivity (Niemelä 2011). Urbanization also generally means smaller and more isolated fragments of habitat for most species. Taken together, this implies an elevated risk of local extinction, since long-term species persistence depends on the connectivity to other habitat areas from where recolonization could occur (Hanski 1999, Fahrig 2003, Bergsten et al. 2013). On top of this, many urban regions comprise a multitude of administrative subdivisions, which further complicates the management of ecological dynamics in terms of avoiding boundary mismatches (Pickett et al. 1997, 2001).
The 26 municipalities in the county differ greatly in size, with a mean land area of 251 km2 and 383 km2 in standard deviation (median size = 142 km2, county land area = 6526 km2 [Statistics Sweden 2013]). Urban planners in the county are challenged to accommodate an accelerating urbanization while simultaneously managing biodiversity and promoting a sensible use of nature. Lately we have seen more actions to protect and restore wetlands as a response to wetland degradation in the 20th century and to an increased awareness of wetland ecology.
In addition to providing critical support for regional-scale ecological planning, land acquisition, restoration, and stewardship, they have developed and operate a number of innovative programs addressing healthy local food, environmental education/healthy school environments, outdoor recreation, and urban tree canopy.
This is the introductory urban informatics course for undergraduate students. A set of fundamental mathematical and statistical techniques will be introduced. Topics will cover quantitative research techniques which are frequently used in planning and social sciences fields. Typical topics include: Descriptive and inferential statistics, probability, measures of central tendency and dispersion, sampling and estimation, hypothesis testing and analysis of variance (ANOVA).
This is the entry-level data science course for undergraduate students in urban planning. You will learn a set of fundamental concepts, skills, and tools in R for effective data analysis. We will start with basic data import, data cleansing/transformation, and will introduce data visualization later for communication purposes especially for planners. This course builds a common foundation forquantitative analysis among undergraduate and graduate students for a wide application in one or more domain-specific courses in their capstone/thesis/dissertation work in the future. No previous coding experiences are required.
Introduces students to different career paths open to urban studies and planning majors. Students interact with professionals and take part in hands-on activities related to different concentration areas: sustainability, policy & planning, social justice and global cities.
This course examines the social dimensions of environmental change, with an emphasis on cities and regions in the global South. The course is designed for sophomore and junior undergraduate students with interests in areas such as environmental planning, sustainable development, environmental justice, and environmental policy and management.
Explores the evolving role of health in urban planning. Historical and current theories on the relationship between public health and the built environment are highlighted, as are prescriptions for healthy urban design. Community health planning, health disparities, and the needs of special populations in the city are also examined, along with some of the major policy issues affecting urban health care today.
This is an upper-division course in urban economic development. The course is designed for urban planning, architecture, geography, business, economics and engineering students with an interest in economic development. The purpose of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the economic development process and the role urban planning and public policy play in facilitating economic development, concentrating on the local level. In addition to a broad knowledge of economic development planning, you should take away from this course a broader understanding of the institutional and practical elements of economic development. The course sessions will focus on public-private-partnerships and specific projects in urban economic development, including study of potentials and problems, financing urban economicdevelopment through federal grant programs, tax increment financing, and other means.
Over half the global population now lives in cities, and urban land use is expected to triple in area by 2030. As a result of the increasing dominance of cities, ecologists have increasingly focused their attention on urban environments in order to understand the important processes affecting urban ecosystems. Perhaps more than any other ecosystem, however, an understanding of urban habitats requires an analysis of the social as well as ecological factors affecting ecosystems. In this course, we will examine the new urban ecology, and combine ecological analyses with historical, anthropological, and sociological studies of urban nature. 041b061a72