Learning about and embracing change and uncertainty are essential for responding to climate change. Creativity, critical reflection, and cogenerative inquiry can enhance adaptive capacity, or the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to adverse future impacts. However, precisely how learning about change and its driving forces occurs and how experiences are combined with envisioned yet indefinite prospects of the future are poorly understood. We present two linked methodological tools-an assessment of drivers of change and participatory scenario building-used in a climate change adaptation project in Ghana and Tanzania (ALCCAR). We discuss opportunities and challenges of such iterative learning. Our findings suggest that joint exploration, diverse storylines, and deliberation help to expand community-based adaptation repertoires and to strike a balance between hopelessness and a tendency to idealize potential future realities.
Environmental protection and restoration in 10 suburban community plans are compared to the recommendations of an innovative Natural Features Study (NFS) of Markham, Ontario. The secondary plans will accommodate 150 000 people and are North America's largest concentration of new communities planned with traditional neighbourhood design principles. Their planning and development is an early test of whether New Urbanism can collaborate with pre-emptive ecosystem planning. The results of the comparison indicate that the plans met or exceeded most objectives for environmental protection. The record on environmental restoration is mixed, with several proposed links lost during the design and development process, perhaps because the NFS was not adopted as of cial policy before neighbourhood planning began. It appears that environmental restoration is best approached on a regional basis, with plans and nancial incentives in place before land is subject to development pressure.
Living walls and other vertical green infrastructure on building surfaces provide regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services in the built environment. Green walls can also generate food as a provisioning ecosystem service. This article discusses a pilot study monitoring the productivity of a 7.5 m2 outdoor living wall system planted with produce crops during the 2015 summer growing season in State College, Pennsylvania, USA. Irradiance, water usage, and soil moisture data were also collected to assess context and performance of the living wall system during the growing season.
This paper presents a conceptual framework for using “convivial greenstreets” (CG) as a resource for climate adaptation. When applied consistently, CG can become an emerging green practice with a positive impact on urban adaptation to climate change: CG may provide localized climate amelioration in ways that support social engagement outdoors. However, as spontaneous phenomena, CG should neither become an academic nor an aesthetic prescriptive tool. How then can CG be used as an active resource for urban adaptation to climate change while avoiding these two potential pitfalls? To explore this question, we present the concept of CG and the ways it can be situated in theoretical urbanism and analogous urban morphologies. We profile the CG inventory corpus and conceptualization that has taken place to date and expand them through a climate-responsive urban design lens. We then discuss how CG and climate-responsive urban design can be brought together while preventing the academization and aestheticizing of the former. This discussion is illustrated with a group of visualizations. We conclude by submitting that climate-responsive urban design and extensive and robust CG practices can co-operate to promote more resilient communities and urban climates. Finally, the conceptual framework herein sets an agenda for future research.
This paper introduces convivial greenstreets and explores their contributions to sustainability and inclusive place making in the city. It focuses on private sector green installations along the spatially constrained streets of western European urban cores. I observe that particular kinds and intensities of plants and small gardens seem to be serving as both context for, and generator of, conviviality-a crucial trait of local civil society that seeks to advance a sustainability agenda. Next, through an interplay of empirical observation and broad reading of social science and urbanism literatures, I define essential attributes that tie together notions of street-side gardening, interacting agents (e.g. residentgardeners, merchant-gardeners, engaged passersby, etc.), and spatial and physical contexts. With this in hand, a typology is constructed, with examples drawn from a corpus of site photographs. I suggest that streets passing the intertwined tests of 'green-ness' and openarmed conviviality may involve positive forces ranging from small idiosyncratic expressions, to shared cultural pluralism, to green activism as a counterpoint to globalization. I conclude by suggesting that, beyond the provision of ecosystem services, convivial greenstreets may provide spatial and ontological contexts within which sustainability capital can accrue in the evolving metropolis.
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