Urban planet: knowledge towards sustainable cities

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look at our urban environment, bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines: from sociology and political science to evolutionary biology, geography, economics and engineering. It includes the perspectives of often neglected voices: architects, journalists, artists and activists. The book provides a much needed cross-scale perspective, connecting challenges and solutions on a local scale with drivers and policy frameworks on a regional and global scale. The authors argue that to overcome the major challenges we are facing, we must embark on a large-scale reinvention of how we live together, grounded in inclusiveness and sustainability. This title is also available Open Access.

Contents -- List of contributors -- Preface -- Introduction -- Dynamic urban planet -- Global urbanization: perspectives and trends -- Embracing urban complexity -- Understanding, implementing, and tracking urban metabolism is key to urban futures -- Live with risk while reducing vulnerability -- Harness urban complexity for health and wellbeing -- Macro-economy and urban productivity -- Global urban sustainable development -- Rethinking urban sustainability and resilience -- Indicators for measuring urban sustainable development and resilience -- The un, the urban sustainable development goal and the new urban agenda -- Utilizing urban living laboratories for social innovation -- Can big data make a difference for urban management? -- Collaborative and equitable urban citizen science -- Urban transformations to sustainability -- Sustainability transformation emerging from better governance -- To transform cities, support civil society -- Governance and the new politics of collaboration and contestation -- Seeds of the future, found in the present -- Provocations from practice -- Sustainability, karachi, and other irreconcilables -- What knowledge do the cities themselves need? -- Banksy and the biologist: redrawing the twenty-first century city -- Every community needs a forest of imagination -- How can we shift from a imaged-based city to a life-based city? -- A chimera called smart cities -- Beyond fill-in-the-blank cities -- Persuading policy makers to implement sustainable city plans -- To live or not to live: urbanisation and the knowledge worker -- City fragmentation and the commons -- Cities as global organisms -- From concrete structures to green diversity: ecological landscape design for -- Restoring urban nature and children's play -- Building cities: a view from india -- The barking dog syndrome -- Overcoming inertia and reinventing "retreat" -- Money for old rope -- An aesthetic appreciation of tagging -- Understanding arab cities -- Who can implement the sustainable development goals? -- Achieving sustainable cities by focusing on urban underserved -- The rebellion of memory -- Cities don't need "big" data- they need innovations that connect to the local -- Digital urbanisation and the end of big cities -- The art of engagement / Activating Curiosity -- Nairobi's illegal city makers -- Active environmental citizens with receptive government officials can enact change -- The sea wall -- Academics and non-academics: who's who in changing the culture of knowledge -- Creation? -- Private fears in public spaces -- Leadership: science and policy as uncomfortable bedfellows -- Sketches of an emotional geography towards a new citizenship -- The shift in urban technology innovation -- Greening cities: our pressing moral imperative -- Recognition deficit and struggle for unifying city fragments -- Disrespecting the knowledge of place -- Broadening our vision to find a new eco-spiritual way of living -- Synthesis.