The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Cities and Landscapes in the Pacific Rim

Yizhao Yang, Anne Taufen, Yizhao Yang, Anne Taufen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367471149
• eBook ISBN: 9781000532500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

This handbook addresses a growing list of challenges faced by regions and cities in the Pacific Rim, drawing connections around the what, why, and how questions that are fundamental to sustainable development policies and planning practices. These include the connection between cities and surrounding landscapes, across different boundaries and scales; the persistence of environmental and development inequities; and the growing impacts of global climate change, including how physical conditions and social implications are being anticipated and addressed. Building upon localized knowledge and contextualized experiences, this edited collection brings attention to place-based approaches across the Pacific Rim and makes an important contribution to the scholarly and practical understanding of sustainable urban development models that have mostly emerged out of the Western experiences. Nine sections, each grounded in research, dialogue, and collaboration with practical examples and analysis, focus on a theme or dimension that carries critical impacts on a holistic vision of city-landscape development, such as resilient communities, ecosystem services and biodiversity, energy, water, health, and planning and engagement.

This international edited collection will appeal to academics and students engaged in research involving landscape architecture, architecture, planning, public policy, law, urban studies, geography, environmental science, and area studies. It also informs policy makers, professionals, and advocates of actionable knowledge and adoptable ideas by connecting those issues with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. The collection of writings presented in this book speaks to multiyear collaboration of scholars through the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes (SCL) Program and its global network, facilitated by SCL Annual Conferences and involving more than 100 contributors from more than 30 institutions.

The Open Access version of chapters 1, 2, 4, 11, 17, 23, 30, 37, 42, 49, and 56 of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003033530, have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Sustainable cities and landscapes Cultivating infrastructures of health

Anne Taufen and Yizhao Yang

DOI: 10.4324/9781003033530-1

Introduction

The creation of sustainable cities and landscapes is a central challenge of the twenty-first century. While theories and principles are emerging in the pursuit of a sustainable future, much of the practice aimed for such a prospect remains experimental and ad hoc in nature. To bring about desired outcomes and avoid unintended consequences, actions should be grounded in a better understanding of how cities and landscapes work, a clearer articulation of goals and visions, and more critical assessment of existing efforts. The long-term success of these actions necessarily relies upon systems of mutual learning and co-production based on place-based investigation that informs global health equity, climate stability, and decolonized spatial development (Agyeman, 2013; Barry & Agyeman, 2020; Ratima et al., 2019). The Pacific Rim, where the “Ring of Fire” denotes widespread geological instability and uneven urbanization demands locally sensitive solutions, is a macrocosm of the challenges facing regions around the world. Matching global goals with local context is essential, so that innovation is both place-based and widely useful.

The Pacific Rim must be at the forefront of any global progress toward sustainable development. The region includes parts of four continents (Asia, Australia/Oceania, Latin America, North America) abutting the Pacific Ocean, as well as the islands within (see Figure 1.1). It is home to more than 40% of the world population from close to 50 countries and regions of diverse cultural, economic, and political contexts. The Pacific Rim is a global space of ongoing flows and circulations of people, cultures, and norms; it is an economic juggernaut, through globalization of trade and patterns of production and consumption; and it is the world’s central political field, with global military power concentrated at several points around its perimeter (Douglass, 1998; Olds, 2001; Ong, 1999; Smith, 1989). An uneven economic growth has persisted in this region with growth now slowing in heavily urbanized areas and accelerating in urbanizing parts. In 2018, North America was the most urbanized region in the world, although the urbanization rate has declined over the last two decades; and Asia is expected to have the fastest rate of urbanization and to house the world’s most populous metropolises by 2050, while also having the largest overall number of people living in poverty (UNDESA, 2019). Despite the striking differences in their sizes, political and economic structures, and stages of urbanization, all geographies in this region face common issues of climate change, disaster risk, and rising inequalities (United Nations, 2019). Adopting meaningful planning and policy actions to deal with these issues depends on our collective capacity to know, comprehend, analyze, and solve them. Improvement of this capacity requires and benefits from sharing information, innovation, and insights from cities and regions in the Pacific Rim, which has motivated the materialization of this volume.

Figure 1.1 A map of the Pacific Rim and distribution of cases studied in the handbook

Before presenting an overview of the book content, we acknowledge that our temporal, geographical, and cultural positions shape our understanding of what sustainable development means for cities and landscapes. The moment in history that we are living into and through, where climate change and a global pandemic further discipline our interpretation of world and local conditions, leads us to concepts of health, infrastructure, and cultivation to correspond with why, what, and how sustainable development policies and planning practices can contribute to making cities and landscapes resilient, equitable, and caring. We elaborate these concepts below to foreground their significance in helping us frame and structure this book into three main components: (1) why we need sustainable cities and landscapes (health), (2) what underlying systems support, maintain, and strengthen them (infrastructures), and (3) how we build capacity to sustain equitable growth and social-ecological resilience (cultivation).

Situating sustainable development policy and planning practice: why, what, how

WHY: health

Universals are notoriously hard to pin down. Sustainability, justice, innovation, love, well-being: globally, these are pervasive and honored concepts; yet in the practices, traditions, expectations, and ways of knowing that characterize actual places, they manifest differently. “Health” is an important concept for global sustainability and urban development because so many of the behaviors and interactions realized in spaces bear directly on the mortality and well-being of humans and other species (Hodson, 2016; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine et al., 2016; Stimson, 2013). As an organizing universal, “health” also leaves itself open to various interpretive moves; yet, two aspects of its definition show real traction and promise for the policy and practice of sustainable development.

First, health can be conceptualized through an easily recognizable and measurable set of characteristics. Bio-function provides some degree of clarity around what sustainability looks like, or at any rate reasonably reliable proxy measures for what it might mean for different organisms and systems and how it can be supported, protected, enabled, and enjoyed. Understandings of species and habitat health inform practices such as adaptive management and ecosystem services, with sophisticated, evidence-based approaches for plant and animal communities experiencing different phases or challenges. Humans who are in stages of rapid brain development, or reproducing offspring, or recovering from disease, or immunocompromised require particular conditions in order to survive and thrive. An ecology that supports health will be one that recognizes, delimits, and nourishes the sources of metabolic and cell-renewing energy for organisms within it. For humans, this may involve complex choices and trade-offs, which is a different constraint than the presence or absence of empirical knowledge that permits such prioritizations. Managing for health may be one of the most profoundly human pursuits we are designed to undertake, for ourselves and in coordination with others (Lee, 2014; Nunes et al., 2016; Petrini, 2010). If a frequent and merited critique of the sustainability movement is its lack of substantive heft (“Sustainability of what? Whose values? Which power dynamics? Why?”) (Littig & Griessler, 2005; Long, 2014; While et al., 2004), then the centering of health as an outcome to be sustained helps provide tangible ways of defining what is needed, for whom, and why. Critically, it puts front and center the understanding that human health relies on symbiotic relationships with non-human species.

Second, perhaps counterintuitively but crucially for the social ecology of urbanizing regions around the Pacific Rim, health permits a broad understanding of its drivers and causal pathways (Grzywacz & Fuqua, 2000; Stokols, 1996). Public health has moved decisively in the direction of acknowledging the social determinants, environmental conditions, and community mechanisms impacting individuals’ medical status, physical vitality, and overall longevity (Corburn, 2017; Schulz & Northridge, 2004). Embraced by the World Health Organization as the “non-medical factors that influence health outcomes”, social determinants of health include economic status, education, nutrition, shelter, interpersonal relationships, and access to basic amenities (Marmot et al., 2008; WHO, 2013). Importantly, inclusion and non-discrimination, as well as the absence of structural conflict are key components of healthy living conditions for human beings, connecting medical science and social science in our understanding of health outcomes. The natural and built environments shape experience, exposures, and resource availability for most people, making the physical support systems of cities and their surrounding landscapes central to the health of those who live there, and underpinning WHO’s holistic and multifaceted approach to health through “healthy settings” (WHO, 1986). Distribution of opportunity and resources will affect who gets and remains healthy, and thus relates to broader goals of environmental justice and global equity. Sustainable development is conventionally constructed around the “three E’s” of economy, environment, and equity; however, human health and health outcomes, as well as those of plants and animals within the systems where we share and depend upon resources, provide a unifying focus that has somewhat eluded sustainability policy and practice over the last several decades (Friel et al., 2011; Kjellstrom & Mercado, 2008).

In the near future, we expect health promotion and health equity to take up larger roles in the political discourse and planning implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations in 2015. Since the cholera epidemic of the mid-nineteenth century led to the first collective reckoning in the US with the public interest in water and wastewater infrastructure, the intertwining of public health with urban planning and development has expanded to improving urban parks and green space, regulating urban land use through building and zoning codes, and more recently promoting more walkable places. At the current moment, scientifically unifying, and experientially integrating, global public health has perhaps never seemed quite as personally relevant, politically resonant, and generally ascendant in the public imagination as it does in the midst of a devastating worldwide pandemic. The COVID-19 illness caused by coronavirus infections killed over three million people, with some estimates between 7 and 13 million (“Counting the Dead”, 2021) between December 2019 and May 2021 (roughly a year and a half).

Many of the conditions and capacities that sustainable development experts have been advocating for years – such as strong systems of governance and communication, safe and secure employment and housing, regionally efficient and functionally sufficient supply chains and distribution systems, and adequate public open space for outdoor gathering, recreation and exercise, psychological restoration, and urban environmental function – are the very investments that would have helped to limit the spread of this dangerous disease and ameliorate its effects. These imperatives of equitable development have gained a higher level of acceptability, thanks to the threat of widespread economic devastation and loss of life that are hallmarks of a global health crisis.

WHAT: infrastructures

Systems are the basis of sustainable cities and landscapes. These include built systems, such as those for water conveyance and treatment, and for mobility of people and goods; socio-technical systems such as networks of communication and governance; and natural and landscape systems that support the environmental function and social needs of urban-rural regions. Taken together, such systems of interconnected space, energy, and activity organize the health of communities throughout the Pacific Rim and are the infrastructure of sustainable urban development. The role of infrastructure in regional and urban studies (Glass et al., 2019), in national and international policy contexts (Graham & Marvin, 2001), and in the lived experience of people moving through their daily lives (Amin, 2014) will understandably tend to focus on the large-scale, public works projects of ports, railways, power plants, highways, airports, sewers, bridges… the essential architecture of urbanization and industrialization (Gandy, 2014; Kaika, 2005; Schindler & Kanai, 2019). A unifying research interest of contributors to this volume is spatial; the infrastructures at the fore of our inquiries and analysis are physical and environmental, constructed or natural. The limited...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Section editors
• List of contributors
• 1 Sustainable cities and landscapes: cultivating infrastructures of health
• 2 The APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub: a platform for collaborative knowledge production and action
• 3 Learning spaces of policy mobility for sustainable cities and landscapes: the role of researchers and educators
• Section 1 Vulnerable communities, resilience, and climate justice
• Section 2 Food and nutrition security
• Section 3 Cities and biodiversity
• Section 4 Water
• Section 5 Renewable energy landscapes across the Pacific Rim
• Section 6 Greenspace for healthy living
• Section 7 Urban design and place making
• Section 8 Smart sustainable cities
• Section 9 Co-​production for sustainable development
• Index