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Sustainability
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Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation
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Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Air, Climate Change and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2020) | Viewed by 17935

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Eric Chu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, USA
Interests: climate change adaptation and resilience; environment and society; urban planning and governance; urbanization and development; equity and justice

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The need for adapting urban settlements and infrastructure to projected climate changes is increasingly gaining attention. In recent years, numerous academic and policy studies have illustrated the need to garner political attention and leadership, address scientific uncertainty in decision-making, as well as ensure that planning approaches are broadly inclusive and equitable. Furthermore, many case studies have shown how climate adaptation is complicated, requiring sustained resource support, broad participation, and collaboration between different urban actors. However, recent discussions have seen a marked shift towards advocating for climate resilience and transformation, setting even more ambitious goals for already resource- and capacity-constrained urban local governments.

This Special Issue tackles the planning complexities associated with the rhetorical progression from climate adaptation to urban resilience and transformation. Resilience provides a more system-based approach to rethinking urban environmental futures while transformation advocates for a complete renewal of political, economic, and social structures that drive climate change in the first place. These newer concepts may offer more radical visions of urban living, infrastructure, and politics, but it remains unclear how they relate to existing urban planning and development agendas, which encompass traditional risk management, social welfare, sustainability, and human security functions. As more resources are devoted to promoting climate resilience and transformation in cities, there is increasing need to design more innovative and radical approaches to embed these ideas into urban planning and development practice.

With this context in mind, this Special Issue invites submission that theorize or empirically illustrate innovative forms of climate adaptation, resilience, and transformation planning in cities. Innovations can be political, social, economic, cultural, or spatial in nature. The Special Issue is framed around the following indicative questions:

  • What are the drivers of adaptation, resilience, and transformation planning in urban contexts? How do cities understand the differences and similarities between these concepts?
  • What are the political and governance opportunities and constraints associated with adaptation, resilience, and transformation? What are the trade-offs and dilemmas?
  • To what extent do equity, inclusion, and justice considerations direct efforts to plan for adaptation, resilience, and transformation?
  • What forms of planning innovation facilitate climate adaptation, resilience, and transformation in cities? What interventions are eventually implemented and how?

The Special Issue welcomes submissions representing all regional, political, and cultural contexts. Submissions that offer critical evaluations, synthetic assessments, speak to under-represented regions, chart new theoretical or conceptual domains, or offer practical guidance to decision makers are particularly encouraged. The insights derived from this Special Issue will also help to inform the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Dr. Eric Chu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • urban planning
  • climate change adaptation
  • environmental transformations
  • urban governance
  • innovations
  • resilience
  • equity and justice
  • planning practice

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 2882 KiB  
Article
Local Planning Practice towards Resilience: Insights from the Adaptive Co-Management and Design of a Mediterranean Wetland
by Emma Salizzoni, Rocío Pérez-Campaña, Fernando Alcalde-Rodríguez and Ruben Talavera-Garcia
Sustainability 2020, 12(7), 2900; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072900 - 5 Apr 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2884
Abstract
Although widely, as well as recently explored, the concept of urban resilience still poses important issues in terms of its operationalization. For this reason, best practices that show how the resilience concept has been turned into planning practice are much needed. This article [...] Read more.
Although widely, as well as recently explored, the concept of urban resilience still poses important issues in terms of its operationalization. For this reason, best practices that show how the resilience concept has been turned into planning practice are much needed. This article presents and discusses the case study of the Charca de Suárez Nature Concerted Reserve, an urban wetland situated along the Andalusian coast (Spain), to contribute to filling the gap on the operationalization of urban resilience at the local planning level. In the Charca, an adaptive co-management and design approach has been successfully put into practice to foster local urban resilience. Starting from some recent key studies on planning and management policies for urban resilience, we propose a framework to read, understand and evaluate the Charca experience, and more generally, resilience-based projects. The analysis highlighted the following crucial key aspects for urban resilience in the Charca case study: A collaborative governance model; and the building of community-capitals. The Charca de Suárez Nature Concerted Reserve can actually be acknowledged as an innovative planning practice, a source of inspiration for visions and experiments oriented to urban resilience. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation)
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22 pages, 565 KiB  
Article
Are Cities Aware Enough? A Framework for Developing City Awareness to Climate Change
by Marta Iturriza, Josune Hernantes, Ahmed A. Abdelgawad and Leire Labaka
Sustainability 2020, 12(6), 2168; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062168 - 11 Mar 2020
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 3982
Abstract
Cities are growing and becoming more complex, and as they continue to do so, their capacity to deal with foreseen and unforeseen challenges derived from climate change has to adapt accordingly. In the last decade, an effort has been made to build city [...] Read more.
Cities are growing and becoming more complex, and as they continue to do so, their capacity to deal with foreseen and unforeseen challenges derived from climate change has to adapt accordingly. In the last decade, an effort has been made to build city resilience and improve cities’ capacity to respond to, recover from and adapt to climate change. However, certain city stakeholders’ lack of proactive behavior has resulted in less effective city resilience-building strategies. In this sense, the importance of developing stakeholders’ awareness of climate change in order to ensure proactivity is documented in the literature. However, there is a lack of studies that define how, when and what should be done to develop stakeholders’ climate change awareness at a city scale. This paper presents a framework to develop stakeholders climate change awareness as a result of a systematic literature review and a co-creation process with the participation of 47 experts through a focus group and a Delphi study. The framework defines a four-step process and includes nine policies that seek to develop stakeholders’ climate change awareness. The framework concludes determining the responsibilities of each stakeholder by defining the policies they should implement, and the effect one policy might cause on other stakeholders and among policies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation)
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15 pages, 5183 KiB  
Article
Assessment of Urban Heat Risk in Mountain Environments: A Case Study of Chongqing Metropolitan Area, China
by Dechao Chen, Xinliang Xu, Zongyao Sun, Luo Liu, Zhi Qiao and Tai Huang
Sustainability 2020, 12(1), 309; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010309 - 31 Dec 2019
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2694
Abstract
For urban climatic environments, the urban heat island (UHI) effect resulting from land use and land cover change (LUCC) caused by human activities is rapidly becoming one of the most notable characteristics of urban climate change due to urban expansion. UHI effects have [...] Read more.
For urban climatic environments, the urban heat island (UHI) effect resulting from land use and land cover change (LUCC) caused by human activities is rapidly becoming one of the most notable characteristics of urban climate change due to urban expansion. UHI effects have become a significant barrier to the process of urbanization and sustainable development of the urban ecological environment. Predicting the spatial and temporal patterns of the urban heat environment from the spatial relationship between land use and land surface temperature (LST) is key to predicting urban heat environment risk. This study established an Urban Heat Environment Risk Model (UHERM) as follows. First, the urban LST was normalized and classified during three different periods. Second, a Markov model was constructed based on spatio-temporal change in the urban heat environment between the initial year (2005) and middle year (2010), and then a cellular automata (CA) model was used to reveal spatial relationships between the urban heat environments of the two periods and land use in the initial year. The spatio-temporal pattern in a future year (2015) was predicted and the accuracy of the simulation was verified. Finally, the spatio-temporal pattern of urban heat environment risk was quantitatively forecasted based on the decision rule for the urban heat environment risk considering both the present and future status of the spatial characteristics of the urban heat environment. The MODIS LST product and LUCC dataset retrieved from remote sensing images were used to verify the accuracy of UHERM and to forecast the spatio-temporal pattern of urban heat environment risk during the period of 2015–2020. The results showed that the risk of urban heat environment is increasing in the Chongqing metropolitan area. This method for quantitatively evaluating the spatio-temporal pattern of urban heat environment risk could guide sustainable growth and provide effective theoretical and technical support for the regulation of urban spatial structure to minimize urban heat environment risk. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation)
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24 pages, 5736 KiB  
Article
Shifts in Spatial Plans for Flood Resilience and Climate Adaptation: Examining Planning Procedure and Planning Mandates
by Meng Meng, Marcin Dąbrowski and Dominic Stead
Sustainability 2020, 12(1), 105; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010105 - 21 Dec 2019
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4326
Abstract
The paper examines the development of different spatial plans to address flood resilience in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, one of the most vulnerable cities to flooding and climate change. The analysis focuses on the differences in planning procedures and planning mandates (determined [...] Read more.
The paper examines the development of different spatial plans to address flood resilience in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, one of the most vulnerable cities to flooding and climate change. The analysis focuses on the differences in planning procedures and planning mandates (determined by different plans in authority) before and after the launch of the Sponge City Plan which calls for numerous spatial resilience measures to address the increasing flood risk. The analysis reveals that the introduction of the Sponge City Plan has changed the role of planning from onlooker to active participant in the arena of flood governance. In addition, new plans combine long-term strategic visions, soft principles, and strict regulations with an aim to promote concrete planning practice between multiple layers with a clear mandate. Despite these shifts, institutional and territorial challenges remain. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation)
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22 pages, 7918 KiB  
Article
The Green Infrastructure Assessment System (GIAS) and Its Applications for Urban Development and Management
by Dongwoo Lee and Kyushik Oh
Sustainability 2019, 11(14), 3798; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11143798 - 11 Jul 2019
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3418
Abstract
Adverse changes of the landscape resulting from diverse human activities have consequently caused quality decline and functional degradation of the natural landscape, endangering the natural habitats of various species. Meanwhile, technical advancements in the area of spatial analysis including GIS and remote sensing [...] Read more.
Adverse changes of the landscape resulting from diverse human activities have consequently caused quality decline and functional degradation of the natural landscape, endangering the natural habitats of various species. Meanwhile, technical advancements in the area of spatial analysis including GIS and remote sensing enable many kinds of easy-to-quantify landscape indices. Although some systems were developed to support assess landscape indices, developing systems for practical decision-making in spatial planning was insufficient. In this study, the GIS-based Green Infrastructure Assessment System (GIAS) was developed for integrated assessment of diverse landscape ecological values to use in spatial planning and management based upon indices sets that are mainly represented as structure, function, and dynamics of the landscape. In order to verify the effectiveness of the system, two case studies involving the city of Namyangju, northeast of Seoul, were conducted by applying GIAS to the (1) macro scale and (2) micro scale. The study results demonstrate the capability of GIAS as a planning support tool to perform concrete assessment of landscape ecological values and performance both on the macro and micro scale, and its applicability to diverse stages in spatial planning. By utilizing GIAS, frequent human-induced impacts resulting from development projects can be examined in advance, and proactive alternatives can be prepared. In addition, effective decision-making for scientific and systematic planning and management of green infrastructure can be achieved. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovations in Planning for Urban Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation)
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