Challenges of Urban Changes
Urban changes present various challenges, including increased demand for infrastructure and services, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Rapid urbanization can strain resources and lead to issues such as traffic congestion and inadequate housing. Additionally, urban changes can impact cultural identity and community cohesion, requiring careful planning and management to address these challenges effectively.
6 Key excerpts on "Challenges of Urban Changes"
eBook - ePubGendered Approaches to Spatial Development in Europe
Perspectives, Similarities, Differences
- Barbara Zibell, Doris Damyanovic, Ulrike Sturm, Barbara Zibell, Doris Damyanovic, Ulrike Sturm(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Contemporary challenges in spatial development Susan Buckingham and Anastasia-Sasa Lada Introduction As the foregoing chapters have demonstrated, spatial development is not renowned for its gender sensitivity. While the projects identified indicate how a sensitivity to gender difference, and attempts to include more women as professional and lay participants, can make for more liveable cities for everyone, these developments will be – indeed are being – tested by cross-border challenges to societies in Europe, as elsewhere. We consider three of these challenges here: the effects of and need to address climate change, forced migration of refugees, and austerity. These challenges are not mutually exclusive, indeed, arguably, they can be strongly interlinked (for example, a severely degraded environment caused by a changing climate forces international migrations either directly or, as a result of conflict, indirectly). These challenges are qualitatively and spatially different to those discussed elsewhere in this book in that they are international in scope. Climate change is a global phenomenon produced by cumulative actions in different places – particularly in rich countries with high levels of consumption. The effects are most acutely felt in places remote from where the contributing pollutants were first released. The most recent financial crisis, while experienced most acutely by poor communities within affected countries and by poorer countries, is attributable to banks and other financial institutions far from those who are expected to adjust their economies through reduced welfare, pensions, wages and/or public services. Forced migrations as a result of climate change, financial crises, war and other catastrophes frequently cross international borders although societies which are complicit in producing the circumstances provoking these migrations are often unwilling hosts...
eBook - ePubReconstructing Urban Economics
Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment
- Franklin Obeng-Odoom(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Zed Books(Publisher)
...(2014, p. 1923), namely reviewing the determinants of changing urban systems, examining population movements within changing urban systems, and looking at the nexus between spatial organisation of urban systems and urban and regional economic performance. This chapter dismantles the ‘urban challenge’ into some of its key constituent parts. Its claim is that it is futile to seek to correct a challenge without an appreciation of its internal and external mechanisms related to the formation and transformation of cities, and the institutions, structures, and drivers that are important in a serious study of cities. It argues that market forces remain crucially important in the formation, expansion, and form of cities to date. However, they play different roles in the development of cities over time. In addition, they work closely with other important forces such as colonialism and neocolonialism which tend to set up a chain reaction to pattern urban development years after they have formally ended. Indeed, the urban system called forth by past colonial urban development both reflects and moulds it, although the system is mediated by current national and international policies, and by the ruling and changing mode of production, consumption, and distribution. Urban growth and the rate of urbanisation may not be ‘problems’ in themselves, but they contribute to shaping the urban structure which, in turn, influences the rate of urbanisation. Throughout this process of change and continuity, there are diverse consequences for land, labour, and capital mediated by the state and other institutions. It follows that the urban challenge is neither about growth rate, size, pattern, nor rural-urban/urban-economic development experiences, but rather the complex evolving webs of interrelationships that confound simple and static binaries...
eBook - ePubUrban Transformations
Geographies of Renewal and Creative Change
- Nicholas Wise, Julie Clark, Nicholas Wise, Julie Clark(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...p.1 Introduction Geographies of renewal and creative change: assessing urban transformation Nicholas Wise and Julie Clark Critical directions Processes of urban change are defined and understood differently across and within different geographies. In Europe, policymakers favour the term ‘regeneration’, whereas in North America, ‘renewal’, ‘redevelopment’ or ‘revitalization’ are commonly used. However, shifting economic conditions, demographic composition and environmental pressures mean that, for most long-established cities, managing urban change is a high-priority issue (Wang et al., 2014). In this book, we use the term ‘transformation’ in recognition of the agency underpinning urban change: whether driven by local situations, civic agendas, regional influences or national policy, the ongoing processes of unmaking and remaking in our cities necessarily serve or undermine different interest groups. Although economic growth, environmentally sustainable development and social justice might be broadly accepted as the ideal goals of urban planning (Bramley et al., 2004), there is no easy synergy between those objectives. As academics engaged with urban and social geography, it is our role to tell the story of how urban transformation impacts on people’s lives and everyday interactions – to question where and to whom benefit accrues from these changes. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to critically assess the theory and practice of urban transformation in different geographic and socio-political contexts and, in doing so, offer insight into both risk and reward as local communities and public authorities creatively address the challenge of building vital and sustainable urban environments. Contemporary interventions, designed to achieve urban transformation, can be considered as a subset within the long trajectory of forces driving urban morphology (see Bosselmann, 2009; Hénaff, 2016)...
eBook - ePubThe Historic Urban Landscape
Managing Heritage in an Urban Century
- Francesco Bandarin, Ron van Oers(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...People change their lifestyles when they move from the countryside to the city ’. 2 Since the advent of industrialisation, urbanisation has been viewed as key to economic growth and social development. In general, urban residents have higher rates of literacy, lower rates of fertility, and more economic opportunity. Urbanisation creates opportunities to enhance the quality of life for city dwellers through economies of scale, access to services, agglomeration, transfer of technology, proximity and productivity (Lanzafame and Quartesan, 2009). People bring their value and belief systems with them when they move from the countryside to the city, which are gradually being replaced by new, urban lifestyles. Alexandria However, when the growth of cities is rapid and unmanaged, as has been shown during the past fifty years of urban development, several ‘externalities’ occur. These include environmental stress, such as pollution and land consumption, pressures on housing and urban services, such as electricity, piped water, sewerage and solid-waste management (accompanied by an increasing number of urban dwellers living in slum conditions) and growing income gaps and social inequalities, which can precipitate conflict, crime and violence in societies that are increasingly fragmented in spatial and political terms. The competition for urban land for housing, infrastructure and services is particularly intense in inner-city areas, where skyscrapers are the resulting building form if outward extension is not possible anymore or urban sprawl is restricted. These downtown areas and key nodes in metropolises receive huge investments in real estate and telecommunications, while other parts of the city are neglected when their location is less central and accessible (Sassen, 2001)...
eBook - ePubUrban Theory and the Urban Experience
Encountering the City
- Simon Parker(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...One study identified nine themes in urban sustainability including strategy and development; environmental management and pollution; land-use and management; transport, environment and integration; cultural heritage and architectural issues; planning, development and management; restructuring and renewal; the community and the city; and public safety and security (Mattrisch, 2001). However, critics point out that if by ‘development’ we mean more consumption-based growth, increased production and higher carbon emissions, then this goal is certainly not compatible with ecological sustainability. As the previous chapter found, urban growth in the developing world is increasingly associated with the growth in slums around the fringes of established cities. The UN is committed to improving the lives of some 100 million slum-dwellers by 2020, by which time the total number of slum-dwellers is likely to have reached one billion or one seventh of the predicted world’s total population in 2010 (UN Global Urban Observatory, see also Davis, 2006). Welcome though these interventions will be if words are turned into actions, such an aspiration reveals that even the most optimistic plans fail to scratch the surface of a global urban crisis that is reaching dangerous levels of violence and discontent. 85 The degradation of the urban environment also manifests itself through the atrophication of its communication systems. While many Western local governments have agreed to sign up to traffic containment, waste reduction and environmental protection programmes agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1991 (known as Local Agenda 21), most urban authorities in the cities of the Global South lack even the limited political and economic freedoms available in the West to pursue such objectives...
eBook - ePubUrban Competitiveness
Theory and Practice
- Peter Kresl, Daniele Ietri(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Challenges to cities in the foreseeable future Introduction The emergence of cities from policy structures that were dominated by national and sub-national governments during the past quarter century has confronted them with a wide array of exciting opportunities and foreboding threats to existing activities. These add up to a set of challenges for city leaders that can put them on a new, higher level of economic significance or, conversely, they can ease the city into a path of secular decline. As we will see in Chapter 7, cities do both enhance their competitiveness and allow it to deteriorate and these movements can be substantial over a decade. These movements usually come as the consequence of an external shock such as major technological change or increased openness of the national economy to goods and services made elsewhere or some major economic destabilizing event. Others occur as barely perceptible secular change that is not appreciated until it is too late to respond effectively. Many of the manufacturing centers of the US Industrial Heartland and the centuries-old industrial regions of Europe are silent witness to the power of this phenomenon. With the substantial and increasing liberalization of economic flows among nations, cities have to see themselves as existing in a space over which they and national economic and political leaders have diminishing influence, let alone control. Not only has technological change reduced transportation costs, thus making imports cheaper, but education and skill development in developing countries has made it efficient to do many functions, other than simple assembly work, there. This has posed major impacts on manufacturing and service activities in the developed world. This is seen in the now long-standing phenomena of deindustrialization and global restructuring...
