Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
an international organization, in this case the World Health Organization has taken
the lead in establishing a global network of age-friendly cities and communities
(GNAFCC
2006
), issues that are briefly described in the Healthy City chapter, al-
though if space permitted a wider description of the policies designed to create the
objective in the network name could have been produced.
Other themes are also still at the stage of creating additional ways of improving
the functioning of urban places, rather than something that dominates a city's de-
velopment, so the trends are discussed in appropriate content areas within various
chapters. In addition some may find it surprising that there is no separate chapter
on the idea of Liveable Cities, which has been a popular, if very elusive concept.
However many of the ideas of improving liveability can be seen in the more specific
themes described here that seek to improve the quality of life in cities, especially the
New Urbanism and Green discussions (Chaps. 2 and 4), and Chaps. 12 through 15,
from Safe Cities through Healthy, and Festive to Slow Cities. It is also worth not-
ing how the pejorative term Crap Towns (Jordison and Kiernan
2013
) has received
a lot of attention in Britain, applying to towns that residents consider to be ugly,
miserable, and having little in the way of attractions, facilities, or even desirable
life-styles. Their commercial centres in particular are dead at night, and character-
ised by chain stores that are duplicates of those found in other towns, creating what
could be 'anywhere' places. However this adjectival descriptive is a criticism of the
character of the centres so pilloried, not an active theme that leads to new policies,
so is not be dealt with here. Nevertheless, many of the ideas expressed in several
of the chapters, especially the New Urbanism, Green, Just, Festive and Slow Cities
policies, which could be used to improve the prospects of the places so maligned in
the negative topic title and in the descriptions of the places included.
These caveats combined with limitations of space mean that the themes dealt
with in this topic deal what were considered the most important and general of a se-
ries of new urban development ideas that have emerged within the last two decades.
Other concepts, such as the recently introduced term
tactical urbanism
, was con-
sidered too small scale and diffuse in content to be dealt with here, although some
examples of these types of features are found in several chapters dealing with more
specific general themes . This has become a broad descriptive term for the usually
small scale, low cost, often quick and sometimes temporary additions to improve
or enliven urban landscapes, such as adding benches, agricultural plots, or tempo-
rary pop-up parks in parking lots or even roads. Such bottom-up, creative practice
initiatives are being promoted in internet accessible topics by the New York-based
Street Plans Collaborative (SPC) and certainly help to improve many inner city
areas in particular. Also it is worth noting that there has been an indiscriminate use
of 'city' and 'town' in some of these themes, without much attention to their size,
in the sense that towns are usually regarded as smaller than cities. To take one ex-
ample, the term Slow Cities is rather a misnomer in English terms as the movement
is restricted to places under 50,000 population, places which most people would
describe as towns. Elsewhere the Transition Town movement began with, and is
still dominated by smaller centres, but now includes parts of large places that most
would recognize as cities. So the descriptors 'towns or cities' used by advocates of
