Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
schemes, a failure to thoroughly investigate and resolve, to the satisfaction of local
residents, the negative effects of some new project. Perhaps the most obvious case
is the way that New Urbanism developments in particular have largely ignored the
severe problems of inequality and poverty pockets in cities that has led to the Just
City literature. Another is the way that smart growth polices of increasing density
will certainly help reduce their carbon emissions but often forget that green spaces
are necessary, not only as places for relaxation but by providing health-giving prop-
erties. Obviously, not all of these themes are relevant to all cities. Some, such as
Winter City ideas, are only applicable to places facing extreme cold, although a case
can be made for places having extreme heat or rain to develop and share a new clus-
ter of ideas to help cope with such conditions. In other cases, such as the problems
posed by natural hazards, some cities are at real immediate risk from such hazards
as earthquakes or floods, or have forgotten past disasters caused by such problems
and have been too complacent to adopt policies to reduce future risks of such events.
Others have far less levels of jeopardy from extreme natural processes, although the
changing nature of world climate through anthropogenic warming does mean that
many more urban places need to measure the extent to which they may be threat-
ened by the effects of climatic change and plan accordingly. Similarly economic
prosperity cannot be taken as being for all time; the rapidity of economic change
means that urban places need to develop the capability to be alert to changes that
can affect their future and act to encourage the development of alternative activities.
Despite the occasional overlap, each of these themes is distinctive enough to
deal with either a particular content area, or in the case of Transition Towns with
a new community-based approach to improve a town's sustainability and indepen-
dence, from which various policies have been generated to solve problems. Hence
the themes can be viewed not simply as identifying a problem or problems, but as
ideas also containing clusters of policies designed to resolve them, whether improv-
ing safety or health, or providing more ecological diversity, or reducing pollution.
Increasingly many of the policies being adopted are being subject to evidence-based
reviews to determine their effectiveness relative to other policies, which should
also involve monitoring through time to determine their long term utility. Yet these
new clusters of urban concepts should not be viewed only as providing empirical
contents. In many ways they have a variety of distinguishing features, other than
their co-incidence in time around the beginning of the new millennium, that iden-
tify a distinctive character of the urban themes in the history of urbanism. Five in
particular stand out.
First, they have originated from a
larger variety of sources
than the mainly top-
down national or state government actions after World War II, that created New
Towns, Green Belts or Industrial Controls on industry in large urban places, or the
creation of Enterprise Zones and Urban Development Corporations for decaying in-
ner cities after the stagnation of the period after the 1970s. Certainly many munici-
palities have been involved in creating or implementing various policies within their
political jurisdictions, or combining with surrounding areas to form what amount
to New Regionalist governance structures, or joining networks to seek out new
ideas. But the majority of the new themes have come from wider sources than local
