Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the non-human

The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.     

The urban role of a new university: a case study of Chieti-Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy

The results of the study on the urban role of the University by the Pescara School of Architecture show that a new approach for this subject is needed. A university should be considered not only as a culture-producing institution, but also as an income producer and distributor for the area. In other words it is possible to promote the university as a strategic investment for development; and as a modernization and requalification factor both of the local production and of the human settlement and territorial structures. In the Abruzzo Region, and particularly in the Chieti-Pescara area, the university as a strategic intervention and its possible interactions with the urban system, is closely related to the nature of the urban phenomenon in this particular geographical context. Funds invested by the State in the university flow directly to individuals through the economic behavior of the university users themselves, according to an only partially measurable process. At present, in the Pescara area, it can be assumed that such economic contribution to the local system development is greater that the proceedings of the tourism industry, in an area with a well established tourist appeal.     

Landscape features and potential heat hazard threat: a spatial–temporal analysis of two urban universities

Urban universities are a microcosm of urban built-up areas, such as cities, but with a much smaller scale of spatial resolution. Within universities, there are many types of landscape features exhibiting different heat absorption and transmission capacities. These landscape features generate spatial–temporal heat signatures, and the knowledge about landscape features and urban heat hazard on university campuses is limited. The objective of this research is an assessment of landscape features and the potential heat hazard threats of two urban universities in ASEAN, located in the centre of the equatorial region. The focus of this research is on urban heat hazards in two urban universities in ASEAN, the University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, within the context of the spatial–temporal behaviour of urban heat and the urban heat effects on the environment and human well-being on campuses. The spatial and temporal analysis used to answer the objective of this research via data-gathering methods from image satellite, ground trough, and human perception study. The UM campus and UI campus, both urban campuses, had similar landscape features but had different total percentage areas of these features. The UM campus was 59.1% covered by the densely vegetated surface landscape feature, a percentage lower than that of the UI campus, which was 65.3% vegetation covered. The temporal results for the UHS of the UM campus in 2013–2016 show a maximum temperature of 39 °C. Therefore, the UHS of the UI campus demonstrated temporal behaviour in 2013–2016, with a maximum temperature of 38 °C. The UHS behaviour of the UM campus and UI campus had an air surface temperature with a maximum average temperature of 33 °C. The air surface temperatures exceeding 32 °C at the UM campus (12 pm until 6 pm?=?5 h) lasted for a longer time than those at the UI campus (12 pm until 3 pm?=?3 h). This study showed that, based on the perceptions on both campuses, if temperatures exceeded 30 °C, respondents were very hot and very uncomfortable, which will impact health and decrease work or academic achievements, as perceptions of heat intensity impact human well-being. Students perceived that heat intensity impacted their health and they reported becoming tired and lethargic under maximum temperatures and were very hot and very uncomfortable, and this condition impacted their work activity. These results indicated that, at both the UM and UI campuses, heat intensity impacts human well-being, with risks associated with hot temperatures. These two urban campuses are significant for ASEAN university awareness of the urban heat hazard of the equatorial area.     

What is social sustainability? A clarification of concepts

Though the concept of sustainable development originally included a clear social mandate, for two decades this human dimension has been neglected amidst abbreviated references to sustainability that have focused on bio-physical environmental issues, or been subsumed within a discourse that conflated ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’. The widespread failure of this approach to generate meaningful change has led to renewed interest in the concept of ‘social sustainability’ and aspects thereof. A review of the literature suggests, however, that it is a concept in chaos, and we argue that this severely compromises its importance and utility. The purpose of this paper is to examine this diverse literature so as to clarify what might be meant by the term social sustainability and highlight different ways in which it contributes to sustainable development more generally. We present a threefold schema comprising: (a) ‘development sustainability’ addressing basic needs, the creation of social capital, justice and so on; (b) ‘bridge sustainability’ concerning changes in behaviour so as to achieve bio-physical environmental goals and; (c) ‘maintenance sustainability’ referring to the preservation - or what can be sustained - of socio-cultural characteristics in the face of change, and the ways in which people actively embrace or resist those changes. We use this tripartite of social sustainabilities to explore ways in which contradictions and complements between them impede or promote sustainable development, and draw upon housing in urban areas as a means of explicating these ideas.     

The Road Ahead: The Sustainability Transition and Coastal Research

Although the organizing committee for the 2007 Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) Biennial Conference and its international members supported the inclusion of sustainability science as a thematic element of the meeting, a preliminary review of program abstracts, conducted by entering various combinations of key words into the conference search engine, identified only 50 individual abstracts that incorporated one or more of the key words, or 3.8% of the 1,300 papers presented. Moreover, only 25 abstracts (1.9%) made specific reference to the integration of the natural and social sciences in emerging coastal research priorities. In this context, a framework is presented for incorporating the concepts of sustainable development, sustainability science, especially for the urban coast, and human dimensions into the amalgam of future US and international CERF research.     

校园雨涝灾害风险因素影响机制研究

洪涝灾害作为当前最严重的水患问题影响着校园安全,但目前针对该尺度下的风险研究较少。如何降低灾害风险,提升韧性成为当下校园可持续研究的重要议题。以HER框架为基础,在现有研究的基础上综合运用DEMATEL-ISM法,明确各因素间的影响机制及作用程度,构建多级递阶结构模型。结果表明：（1）校园雨涝灾害风险影响机制为五级三阶结构,其中排水设施排涝能力是最关键的根本致因,极端日降水量、暴雨频率、相对高程差是最有效的直接致因。（2）校园雨涝灾害风险最关键的作用路径是排水设施排涝能力-排水管网设置率-校园排水设施维养频率-植被覆盖率-暴雨频率。研究可为校园雨涝灾害防治提供参考。     

Factors encouraging sustainability integration into institutions of higher education

In view of the mountainous evidence on destruction of environmental quality and societal well-being as a consequence of rapid economic development, sustainability has gained vast attention from the community and industrial players. Tertiary education is a platform through which sustainability can be inculcated within the society as it imparts knowledge and provides various trainings. There has been extensive research on factors that encourage sustainability integration into Institutions of Higher Education in the last decade. However, majority of the previous publications only discuss one or two factors exclusively and there is no literature that summarizes and discusses such factors in a collective manner. This paper provides an overview of the main factors that encourage sustainability integration into Institutions of Higher Education in the last decade. It aims at providing a one-stop reference for future researchers who need a reference on factors that encourage sustainability integration into Institutions of Higher Education, especially those who are interested in conducting a progressive research in this context. Accordingly, a review of relevant publications from year 2000 and above was conducted and it was found that there are generally eight main factors, which encourage sustainability integration into Institutions of Higher Education, which are: (1) integration into curricula; (2) suitable pedagogy; (3) campus management; (4) research; (5) opportunities provision; (6) availability of social capital; (7) awareness level; and (8) community outreach. There is no indicator on the impact level of these factors, and thus, it is suggested that relevant research can be conducted in future.     

利用樟树叶片氮含量和同位素组成初探武汉市大气氮沉降和氮源

为了解武汉市不同城市功能区大气氮沉降的具体特征,对城市交通区、工业区、文教区和市郊交通区、文教区5个功能区的樟树叶片及根际土壤的氮含量和氮同位素组成进行测定,发现城市公路、工厂附近和大学校园的樟树叶片的氮含量明显高于市郊大学校园和公路.城市公路、工厂附近的樟树叶片的氮同位素分别受控于汽车尾气排放的氮氧化物(NOx)、工...     

Sweating bodies: Men,masculinities, affect,emotion

This paper investigates sweat to deepen theoretical understandings of how gender is lived. To do so we adopt a visceral approach that opens possibilities of thinking geographically about the affective ties and emotional bonds of sweat to engage with feminist logics of embodiment. Our interest is in what sweaty bodies can ‘do’. Attention is given to the way that affects, emotions and sensations associated with being sweaty, smelling sweat, as well as touching one’s own sweat, and that of others, provides insights into the gendered lives of people as they move through different context. Our analysis of how gendered is lived through sweaty bodies draws on ‘Summer Living’ narratives of 17 participants who understand themselves as men and live in Wollongong, a city of around 280,000 people on the east coast of New South Wales, Australia. We illustrate the theoretical significance of thinking about sweat for gender and geography by discussing the ambiguity, proximity and collectivity of sweaty bodies; and, the fragility, multiplicity and vitality of sweaty bodies. To conclude we outline how a visceral approach provides possibilities to improve household sustainability policies.     

Spatial form of urbanization,sustainability and fragmented landownership: the example of Ilan in Taiwan’s urbanization

As a part of the inevitable process of industrialization, urbanization and its associated spatial forms generally have a substantial effect on sustainability. This paper considers the spatial form and sustainability of urbanization by evaluating the interaction between land-use planning, urban regimes and the fragmented structure of land ownership. This paper conceptualizes the structure of landownership as an institution that affects the form of spatial development and thereby determines the spatial implications of urban sprawl on sustainability. With reference to the Ilan experience of urbanizing Taiwan, it shows that the development of spatial form and sustainability is the product of planning institution and urban regime mobilization, and it reflects the institutional impact of a fragmented landownership structure. The conclusion also discusses policy implications.     

Making visible: Interrogating the performance of food sharing across 100 urban areas

Interpersonal sharing of food has been an omnipresent feature of human civilisation from hunter-gatherer societies to the present, both as a mechanism through which sustenance is secured and as a means to cement social relations. While the evolutionary dynamism of this food sharing is relatively well documented, critical scholarship has tended to examine contemporary food sharing practices beyond family and friends through case studies of individual initiatives. A broader view of food sharing practices is absent. In addition, there has been little examination of the role that emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) are having on food sharing, despite claims that such technologies offer transformative potential to achieve more secure, sustainable and just food systems. In response, this paper presents a novel landscape level analysis of more than 4000 ICT-mediated urban food sharing activities operating across 100 cities in six continents. Adopting conceptual insights from the intersection of social and economic practice-oriented approaches, the resulting foodsharing database progresses understanding of, and makes visible, the ways in which food (and food-related skills, stuff and spaces) is being shared across diverse urban settings. To conclude, it is argued that the database plays an important productive and performative role in mapping and comparing diverse food sharing economies. Importantly, it provides a springboard for further explanatory research to fine-tune our understanding of the evolution, governance and sustainability potential of urban food sharing.     

Sustainability begins at home? An ecological exploration of sub/urban Australian community-focused housing initiatives

This paper responds to challenges made by Castree [Castree, N., 2004. Environmental issues: signals in the noise? Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), 79-90] and Sneddon [Sneddon, C., 2000. ‘Sustainability’ in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review. Progress in Human Geography 24 (4), 521-549] for human geography to clarify its contribution to environmental debates and engage with recent formulations of sustainability as informed by the ‘new ecology’. This approach focuses on resilience, functional diversity, flexibility and complexity, here used to examine housing sustainability within an industrialised sub/urban context in terms of design philosophy, ownership, management bases, community engagement and funding mechanisms. This framework highlights areas of concern for enhancing the functional diversity of housing systems, echoing recent assertions that challenges for sustainability arise more from trust and power sharing issues, than from physical design and maintenance issues. It is argued that it is precisely human geography’s place-by-place consideration of power, embeddedness, scale and politics that can lend new ecology the social relevance it requires.     

The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya

Over 24 million plastic bags are consumed in Kenya monthly. More than half of the bags end up in the solid waste stream. Plastic bags now constitute the biggest challenge to solid waste management in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to three million people. As a result, plastic bag waste has attracted great political and public attention, especially because the waste has myriad unique environmental problems. This paper seeks to unravel the problem of plastic bag waste in Nairobi through an urban political ecological perspective. Urban political ecology has done much to excavate economic, political, and cultural processes, as well as ecological dynamics that create and re-create urban environments. Little has been done in this context with respect to urban solid waste problems, with the exception of urban political ecology of environmental justice. However, research done within the context of urban political ecology of environmental justice has mainly focused on solid waste problems in the Western World, particularly USA. Drawing on research conducted in Nairobi, as well literature on business and politics, and solid waste management in Kenya, this paper examines the nature of plastic bag waste problem, its political–economic roots and implications for environmental justice.     

Autonomy in a post-neoliberal era: Community water governance in Cochabamba,Bolivia

Bolivia’s leftward political shift, which is frequently described as “post-neoliberal,” is crucially linked to the ideal of autonomy. While autonomy has a long history among leftist theorists and social movements in Latin America, its contemporary importance is related to an ongoing effort on the part of scholars and activists to identify an alternative organizational form that eschews both state actors and private entities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with a group of community-run water systems in peri-urban Cochabamba, this paper asks what autonomous water governance looks like in practice. By presenting a case in which the community water systems made a series of structurally limited “autonomous” decisions that ultimately bound them more closely to the local state and private sector, the paper argues that autonomy faces socio-ecological limitations when conceptualized as a project of internal self-governance. Socio-ecological processes take place at multiple scales and over long time spans; a radical politics of autonomy therefore necessitates a spatially extroverted project that focuses on building strategic alliances that strengthen community autonomy in the long-term.     

国内城市地下空间开发利用现状与发展趋势

我国城镇化水平不断提高的过程中,各类“城市病”是多数城市必须面对的难题,城市地下空间的开发利用成为各个城市解决这一问题的有效途径。在这样的背景下,我国城市地下空间开发利用从21世纪起进入快速发展阶段,十几年来地下空间利用增长迅猛,成就斐然。文章总结了当前我国城市地下空间各功能开发现状,并分等级叙述了我国几类城市地下空间开发利用现状。最后文章提出我国城市地下空间开发利用的趋势是向地质调查先行,网络化与分层化规划,协同化利用,内部环境生态化和人性化,管理数字化和智能化方向发展;不同城市将根据其社会经济需求和地质环境特点差异化重点开发,科学利用城市地下空间资源,发挥其社会、经济效益,让城市更美好。     

Spatial plans and urban development trajectory in Kumasi,Ghana

This research uses empirical data to explore the link between spatial plans and ‘actual development’ occurring in Kumasi, Ghana. The research found that urban development is determined by both spatial plans and spontaneous informal development patterns (i.e. self-organisation). However, self-organisation is more widespread compared to spatially planned neighbourhoods. This phenomenon was expressed in a context of uncertainty created by weak institutional planning system which promote and reinforce haphazard development disregarding urban planning requirements. These findings provide a perspective on urban development that differs from that occurring in cities of developed countries, where planning institutions in consultation with urban residents determine the patterns of urban development. Unfortunately in Kumasi, self-organisation is not viewed as important in mainstream planning system. The paper concludes that more needs to be done in terms of understanding self-organisation processes, and the way they could be integrated into mainstream planning process to respond more fully to the urban development challenges in Kumasi.     

高等教育的生态效率——大学校园生态足迹

介绍了生态足迹成分法的基本原理和计算模型,以东北大学和沈阳大学为例将该方法应用于高等教育的生态效率研究.结果表明:东北大学2003年的生态足迹为24787hm²,即需要24787hm²的生态生产性土地支持该校的各类消费并吸纳所产生的废弃物,其生态效率(即单位生态生产性土地占用可支持的学生数)为0.94人·hm^-2;沈阳大学2003年的生态足迹为17218hm²,生态效率为0.8人·hm^-2.在两所学校的生态足迹中,能源消费的足迹最大,分别占总足迹的68%和54%;食物消费和固态垃圾次之.对东北大学、沈阳大学和澳大利亚Redlands University的比较分析发现,学校所在地的经济发展水平、学生的经济状况以及学校的专业领域构成和研究强度,对大学校园生态足迹、足迹构成和生态效率有重要影响.这一研究定量揭示了高等教育的生态效率及其影响要素,为创建“生态”校园提供了科学的依据,也为评价“生态”校园提供了科学、实用的指标和方法.     

Land use change modeling and the effect of compact city paradigms: integration of GIS-based cellular automata and weights-of-evidence techniques

In recent decades, attaining urban sustainability is the primary goal for urban planners and decision makers. Among various aspects of urban sustainability, environmental protection such as agricultural and forest conservations is very important in tropical countries like Malaysia. In this regard, compact urban development due to high density, rural development containment is known as the most sustainable urban forms. This paper attempts to propose an integrated modeling approach to predict the future land use changes by considering city compactness paradigms. First, the cellular automata (CA) were applied for calculating land use conversion. Next, weights-of-evidence (WoE) which is based on Bayes theory was utilized to calibrate CA model and to support the transitional rule assessment. Several urban-related parameters as well as compact city indicators were utilized to estimate the future land use maps. The results showed how compact development parameters and site characteristics can be combined using the WoE model to predict the probability of land use changes. The modeling approach supports the essential logic of probabilistic methods and indicates that spatial autocorrelation of various land use types and accessibility is the main drivers of urban land use changes.     

Farming the urban fringes of Barcelona: Competing visions of nature and the contestation of a partial sustainability fix

While the concept of urban agriculture investigates the way in which disused land within the consolidated city is returned to its citizens through a variety of farming practices, many pockets of rural land in peri-urban areas continue to be contested by institutions and communities – including informal farmers, formal farmers, municipal planners, metropolitan agencies, and investors – with contrasting interests. To date however, little scholarly attention has been paid to informal practices within the degraded areas of urban fringes and, more specifically, to the link between the expansion of peri-urban agriculture and the civic appropriation and negotiation of space in neglected peripheral areas. In this paper, we ask how a metropolitan sustainability fix is produced and contested both materially and discursively. We also explore how local residents involved in peri-urban agriculture claim the use of land for agricultural practices and in turn attempt to influence the urban agenda of the neoliberal city. Inquiring how competing visions of nature act as obstacles in this negotiation process, our analysis of the peri-urban Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park in Barcelona reveals that the imposition of official visions about how needs for food and agriculture should be fulfilled, which landscapes are esthetically acceptable, what nature is, and how land should be controlled and developed indicate why apparently “marginal” and informal urban agriculture in the periphery has come to be subordinated to the planning of the neoliberal city and of a metropolitan sustainability fix – a partial sustainability fix that is however progressively being questioned and renegotiated.     

Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.