Ayyoob Sharifi

Viability of using global standards for neighbourhood sustainability assessment: insights from a comparative case study

Neighbourhoods are increasingly gaining attention as planning units of great potential for contribution to sustainable development. Many assessment tools such as LEED-ND, BREEAM Communities and CASBEE-UD have been developed to examine the sustainability of neighbourhood development projects. Some of these tools are claimed to be suitable for assessment in different contexts, and LEED-ND has already been utilised in various countries. This study investigates the viability of using global standards through a series of comparative case studies. One certified case from each of the aforementioned tools is chosen and evaluated against its non-corresponding assessment tools. Selected cases are, respectively, Hoyt Yards, MediaCityUK and Koshigaya Lake Town. Results of this study provide evidence that casts doubt on the viability of using global standards. The paper concludes that neighbourhood sustainability assessment should be regarded as a pluralistic practice. This implies that any realistic and reliable assessment should take account of the specificities of specific locations and varying needs of different stakeholders.

Urban Resilience Assessment: Multiple Dimensions, Criteria, and Indicators

Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of studies that focus on enhancing resilience of cities against a multitude of man-made and natural disasters. There has also been an increase in the number of frameworks and tools developed for assessing urban resilience. As climate change advances, resilience will become an even more significant topic in the science and policy circles that influence future urban development. Resilience indicators, in particular, will be essential for helping planners and decision makers understand where their communities stand in terms of resilience and develop strategies and action plans for creating more resilient cities. This chapter draws on the extensive literature on urban resilience assessment and provides a set of principles and indicators that can be used for developing an urban resilience assessment tool. Selected indicators cover multiple dimensions of urban resilience. They are divided into five main categories, namely, materials and environmental resources, society and well-being, economy, built environment and infrastructure, and governance and institutions. It is argued that resilience indicators should be used to help planners understand how best to enhance the abilities to plan/prepare for, absorb, recover, and adapt to disruptive events. The chapter concludes with proposing a matrix to relate resilience indicators with the main underlying characteristics of urban resilience that are namely, robustness, stability, flexibility, resourcefulness, redundancy, coordination capacity, diversity, foresight capacity, independence, connectivity, collaboration, agility, adaptability, self-organization, creativity, efficiency, and equity.

Resilience-Oriented Urban Planning

The concept of resilience is increasingly used in scientific and political discourses on sustainable urban development and urban disaster risk reduction. It has its roots in disciplines such as physics, psychology and ecology and is a relatively new concept in the field of urban planning. This chapter aims to explore the implications of integrating resilience thinking into urban planning. It introduces the concept of resilience-oriented urban planning and discusses how it is distinct from conventional urban planning. Extending the theory of adaptive cycle, it is argued that urban planning should not be considered as a static process. Urban systems are dynamic entities characterized by non-equilibrium dynamics and constantly go through the four phases of ‘exploitation’, ‘conservation’, ‘release’, and ‘reorganization’. Resilience-oriented planning is needed to address dynamics and complexities of urban systems. This chapter provides discussions on paradigm shifts that are needed to integrate resilience thinking into urban planning. These paradigm shifts are discussed in the context of different planning themes, namely, strategy making and visioning, public participation, equity and empowerment, learning from traditional local knowledge, institutional reforms, social networks, sectoral and spatio-temporal dynamics, land use planning, and urban infrastructure. The chapter concludes with some discussions on how these paradigm shifts contribute to integrating principles that underpin the concept of resilience into urban planning and design.

Resilient Urban Form: A Conceptual Framework

Resilience is widely recognized as a pre-requisite for achieving sustainability. Despite the wealth of research on urban resilience, no comprehensive work has been published on the association between urban form and resilience. Form of cities can affect their capacity to survive and thrive in the face of adverse events. Better understanding of the concept of ‘resilient urban form’ and ‘resilient urban form typologies’ is, therefore, essential for achieving more advances in urban resilience. It is essential to elucidate the meaning of ‘resilient urban form’ and explain what issues should be considered to achieve resilient urban morphologies. This chapter elaborates on the concept of ‘resilient urban form’ and introduces a conceptual framework that can be used for its assessment. The conceptual framework emphasizes paying attention to the following issues: ‘resilience of what?’, ‘resilience at what geographic and temporal scale?’, ‘resilience to what’, and ‘resilience for what?’. To answer the first question, various underlying components of urban form should be identified. The issue of ‘resilience at what geographic scale?’ implies that dynamics and interactions across various geographic scales need to be considered. Certain urban form components may be relevant to multiple scales and have different and even opposing affects across different scales. The question of ‘resilience at what temporal scale?’ indicates that, for example, certain urban forms may be desirable when the growth speed of the city is high, but detrimental after it reaches its growth limit. The question of ‘resilience to what?’ is important as certain forms may be favorable in terms of resilience to some hazards but undesirable with respect to others. Finally, elaboration on the question ‘resilience for what?’ helps better understand what specific resilience qualities can be improved through promoting favorable urban forms. The conceptual framework can be utilized to further elucidate the nature of relationships between different components of urban form and resilience of cities. It can also be used to assess resilience of different urban forms across different geographical and temporal scales.

The Impact of Urbanization on Land Use and the Changing Role of Forests in Vientiane

This paper investigates urbanization in Vientiane, the Laotian capital city, and its vicinity. The intent is to address the relationship between urbanization and land use, especially focusing on the changing role of suburban forest. In the Vientiane suburbs, forests still supply many items to villagers: firewood, charcoal materials, wild vegetables, mushrooms, insects, small animals and others. However, when off-farm work increases and commuting to factories is prevalent among villagers, the time to collect and hunt forestry products declines. Foods except for rice are purchased from stores in cash and firewood and charcoal are replaced by propane gas. In the near future, forests may become unnecessary for villagers from an economic aspect. What meaning do suburban forests have? For one, they have cultural and environmental meanings such as the securing of better landscapes and biodiversity, but their more important role is to act as a barrier to prevent urban sprawl.

Is Connectivity a Desirable Property in Urban Resilience Assessments

The need to look at environmental-related problems from a systemic perspective has been increasingly highlighted in current scientific literature. Especially in a context of climate change uncertainty, it is helpful to identify interdependencies and cascading impacts that might happen under certain management or policy scenarios. In the context of resilience management and given the inherent complexity of cities, this becomes especially relevant if one considers potential trade-offs or perverse transformability interventions that may have negative impacts on environmental quality, social equity or well-being. The network perspective in resilience theory has been argued to be useful to assess system’s robustness, connectivity and dependency. Connectivity as a characteristic of the system, has been particularly presented as a determinant of urban resilience in the literature, but, so far and to our knowledge, no study has presented empirical evidence on this regard. To contribute to this debate, this chapter uses a case study on urban energy resilience in the city of Bilbao (Spain) to illustrate the role of connectivity in an urban system and its positive and negative effects on resilience and transformability. Main findings point out the context-specific nature of this property of the system and the difficulty of establishing a normative desirable trend.