No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Urban megaprojects and water justice in Southeast Asia: Between global economies and community transitions
Abstract
Within the Southeast Asian context, urban megaprojects are often delivered in aquatic or semi-aquatic contexts, transforming local hydrological systems used for sanitation, agriculture, sustenance, resource use and cultural purposes by the local populations. This paper addresses a key knowledge gap on the impacts of urban megaprojects on water security and water-related human rights in Southeast Asia through a literature review, field observations and digital earth observation. Three case studies in Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar were used to develop a picture of urban megaproject impacts on urban water landscapes and the human rights of local communities. The paper adapts recent human rights frameworks developed specifically for megaproject life cycles and applies them to the selected urban megaproject case studies. The seven stages in the megaproject life cycle are linked with specific accountability measures for duty bearers. Current challenges and opportunities for the global urban development community are developed in relation to water justice and megaprojects. Further the question of a just urban transition is developed to mediate between megaproject proponents and local communities in the Global South.
... Due to sea level rise and the related risks and impacts on infrastructure systems, coastal societies face multiple evolving hazards, including the immobilization of transportation, blackouts, saltwater intrusion of water supplies and cascading failures that can reverberate throughout the whole settlement system [9][10][11][12]. Insensitive urban development can interact with climate-related risks to exacerbate environmental vulnerability and intensify socio-ecological inequity [13,14]. ...
Around the world, human populations and their supporting infrastructures are concentrated in coastal areas. With rising sea levels, these settlements and urban infrastructures are at risk of service interruptions, lasting damage and frequent climate-related hazards. Wastewater systems are especially vulnerable due to their proximity to coastlines. Despite the seriousness of sea-level-rise-induced challenges, a clear understanding of the risks and potential adaptations of coastal wastewater treatment systems and their associated landscapes in Australia has been overlooked. Further, there is a lack of urgency and awareness concerning this issue. In this study, we consider how scenario-based landscape design approaches might enhance current debates and approaches related to coastal change with particular reference to wastewater treatment systems and associated environmental landscapes. Adelaide is used as a case study, and a range of landscape planning exploratory scenarios are developed and evaluated to assess the possible consequences of different courses of action in uncertain contexts. We find that whilst wastewater treatment plants are threatened by climate-related hazards, there is an opportunity for landscape-scale environmental planning to manage risks and opportunities and improve ecological and economic outcomes. We also find that for wicked multidimensional problems, such as sea level rise, landscape scenario design testing can assist in identifying a number of creative adaptation approaches that are not immediately apparent. We find that approaches such as retreat, defense and accommodation are not mutually exclusive but can each share elements and strategies. The strategic potential of a more creative, scenario-based approach can therefore form a productive part of the sea level rise adaptation of coastal infrastructure landscapes in Australia and elsewhere.
... The second is upgrades to facilitate the efficient movement of people and goods, leading to greater tax revenues that help pay for infrastructure projects. Despite the capability of these projects to generate economic benefits and political aspirations, megaprojects often limit or interrupt access to such benefits for vulnerable people, which is especially not well received by the affected communities [75,76]. ...
Megaproject-induced displacement of populations will now occur more frequently due to massive infrastructure investment in the post-COVID-19 era. The participatory process for megaprojects starts with those in the vicinity; local communities who are directly involved. However, few studies have attempted to map the global knowledge of local community participation in the planning stage of megaprojects. A systematic literature review of public participation in the context of megaproject-induced displacement was conducted to determine these features, and to provide local community insights which are useful for managing social issues around megaprojects and the effects of participation. A total of 32 journal publications were analyzed from the Web of Science (WoS) database, drawing from an initial group of 456 based on citations from 2012 to 2022 to identify the evolution of knowledge trends. It was found that the nonfulfillment participatory process always fails to recognize groups of residents and assess the impacts of megaproject-induced displacement caused to local communities. This lack of recognition at the governmental level contributes to conflict; placing the local community at risk of uncertain megaproject environments. Broader public participation involves local communities, who be harmed by the development strategies of megaprojects, catalyzing their willingness to participate and encourage greater inclusiveness in their interactions, as well as balancing the megaproject’s economic, ecologic, and social interests. The study results demonstrate a consensus was reached, and the effects of megaproject-induced displacement can be mediated.
... The scholarly literature on urban waterfronts has raised important questions about whether and how their redevelopment can be made sustainable. Research suggests that costs of environmental remediation can be prohibitive (De Sousa 2014), that waterfront sites become megaprojects beholden to ambitious financing schemes (Fainstein 2008;Hawken et al. 2021), coordination with local stakeholders is politically fraught (Hagerman 2007), restoration of ecological function is challenging under economic pressures (Swinal and Brears 2017) and driving motives are focused on interurban competition that neglect local qualities and issues (Harris 2017). ...
Urban waterfronts around the world, once the location of industry and trade, have transitioned to new uses. This shift raises important questions for the city-regions they serve, particularly concerning the sustainability of alternative uses. The literature on postindustrial waterfront development shows that many aspiring global cities have claimed waterfronts as places of sustainable urban development by promoting sustainable environmental practices, cultural preservation, and public precincts, parks, and esplanades. Critiques of waterfront developments have raised concerns about green gentrification, local displacement, and capture by global elites, all at the expense of social equity and shared economic prosperity. In this paper, we review the literature to investigate approaches to planning sustainable urban waterfronts in a global political economy. We consider five dimensions of sustainability – ecological, cultural, social, economic, and political – to interrogate how redeveloped urban waterfront sites can “work” to better serve their local and regional populations and ecosystems.
... Further, Cetrulo et al. [116] highlighted that current SDGs approaches do not allow robust conclusions about inequality and accessibility of ecosystem services such as water. Urban development in rapidly urbanizing contexts can exacerbate inequality within cities [60], and this extends to ecosystem services, which are particularly important for vulnerable and poorer populations. ...
Ecosystem services provide essential services for cities and are key factors in achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Such services are best delivered through green infrastructure, which works in resourceful, multifunctional, synergistic, and environmentally sensitive ways to deliver ecosystem services and provide alternative cleaner pathways for the delivery of multiple urban services. It is unclear if current research supports the necessary linkages between ecosystem services, cities, and green infrastructure in order to achieve the SDGs. To answer this question, we conducted a systematic review analysing 3392 studies on the SDGs from the WoS database. The contents of 66 of those with relevance to ecosystem services and urban research were reviewed in depth. We applied network-analytic methods to map the relationships of different knowledge clusters of SDGs research (1) across time, (2) across disciplines, and (3) in relation to ecosystem services and cities. The results of our analysis show that research on the SDGs have developed stronger networks from 2010–2018, but this research has not been sustained. Further, whilst research on cities now occupies a central place in the SDGs literature, research on ecosystem services only shows tentative links to both green-infrastructure research and SDGs research. Such literature on urban green infrastructure remains peripheral to the central challenge of sustainable urban transitions. We conclude that when it comes to the SDGs, research articles typically consider urban services independently of green infrastructure. Further, it suggests that green infrastructure is not generally considered as a sustainable alternative to conventional urban infrastructures. To address this serious shortcoming, we recommend transdisciplinary approaches to link urban ecosystem and urban green infrastructure research to the 2030 global sustainability agenda.
Conflicts caused by mega projects (MPs) always generate strong public opposition and pose significant threats to social harmony. Combined with ubiquitous online access, the spread of online rumors is unparalleled. However, rumor rebuttal on social media has been largely overlooked in engineering sociology. This study attempts a cross-disciplinary approach by crawling data related to anti-rumors of a representative MP from Sina Weibo to identify anti-rumor topics and online stakeholders, and investigates the effectiveness of anti-rumor strategies. The results suggest that the sentiment-based echo chamber effect is not significantly present in both participant and strategy networks. Anti-rumor messages of traditional media and elites are effective, while that of self-media are mainly ineffective. Meanwhile, anti-rumor strategies have different effectiveness in three frameworks. Refutation and guide strategies are effective in the assessment and risk perception framework, sarcastic and disbelief strategies are counterproductive in the risk perception and progress framework, while interrogatory strategy has opposite effects in the assessment and risk perception framework. This research can contribute to developing a systematic understanding of anti-rumor communication and provide recommendations for authorities to intervene social conflicts caused by MPs.Keywordsanti-rumorstrategystakeholdermega projectssocial mediaLDA
Africa is rapidly urbanising and is likely to home to some of the most populous cities within the next decade. Such rapid growth has made the prevention of urban sprawl a Sisyphean Quest in many African cities, as rural fringes are rapidly being transformed into urbanised space. A strategy proposed around the world to address some of the urban challenges is the increasing adoption of a volumetric lens to planning the city. Specifically, to use the urban underground as a strategic site to place infrastructure and free-up superficial urban surface space, in turn potentially helping to create more sustainable, liveable, equitable and just urban environments. Yet, so far, little attention has been paid to the urban underground in Africa cities. In this paper, mobilising Lagos, Nigeria as a case study, we start addressing this lacuna. We provide a critical long-term analysis – spanning the colonial and since independence eras – of how the urban underground has been used in Lagos, focussing on utility (energy, telecommunications, water) and transport infrastructure. We follow this with an analysis of how political economies have shaped underground use and access, with a particular consideration on informal interactions, and how they shape underground use and access. We conclude by offering an assessment of the possibilities and challenges that the urban underground presents for the future of Lagos and other African cities, with a critical consideration of the dynamism of localised volumes and the practices around them.
In Australia, development of coastal areas has created conditions of coastal “squeeze” with both blue green ecosystems and intensive human land uses competing for waterfront land resources in the face of massive global environmental change. This intensive pressure has already resulted in dramatic human influenced environmental disasters with homes destroyed through storm surge and repeated areal flooding alongside the collapse of local mangrove and wetland systems. These inter-related risks and challenges can best be described as a “wicked problem”. This chapter adopts scenario-based design approaches to examine the possibility of win-win outcomes for both human dominated and more natural systems in Port Adelaide, Australia. We combine a case study methodology with scenario-based approaches that integrates both scientific and design-based ways of thinking. Similar to all Australia’s major cities, Adelaide is a coastal city with extensive industrial and residential development of coastal landscapes and is situated in the context of some of Australia’s most valuable, and under threat, marine and estuarine environments. To date in Australia, science-based strategies capable of responding to the current and future evolving socio-environmental challenges have not been combined with large-scale and integrated design thinking. Our scenario based approach utilises retreat, defence, and adaptation strategies to prioritise either specific land uses or a more complex mix of land uses. The result of such testing demonstrates that identifying win-win outcomes are possible through applying scenario based approaches. Such scenario based environmental design is therefore essential to transform urban-environmental governance which generally do not acknowledging the scale or urgency of Australia’s current coastal crises and faces political challenges across all scales.
Development of coastal areas has created conditions of coastal “squeeze”, with ecosystems and intensive human land uses competing for land resources in the face of massive global environmental change. This intensive pressure has already resulted in dramatic human influenced environmental disasters with homes destroyed through storm surges and areal flooding, alongside the collapse of local mangrove and wetland systems. This chapter adopts scenario-based design approaches to examine the possibility of win-win outcomes for both human dominated and more natural systems. We combine a case study methodology from Adelaide (Australia) with scenario-based approaches that integrates both scientific and design-based ways of thinking. Similar to all of Australia’s and many global major cities, Adelaide is a coastal city with extensive development of coastal landscapes and threatened marine and estuarine environments. Our approach utilises retreat, defence, and adaptation strategies to prioritise either specific land uses or a more complex mix of land uses. The result of such testing demonstrates that identifying win-win outcomes is possible. Such scenario-based design is essential to transform urban-environmental governance and planning, which generally does not acknowledge the scale or urgency of Australia’s current coastal crises, and faces political challenges.
Recent studies present a confluence, although rarely discussed, of urban morphology and urban green infrastructure (UGI), considering their growing concern for green space planning and management during landscape revitalisation. This research thus explores their under-investigated associations: the significance of the fringe belt (FB) as both a morphological concept and physical entity for UGI planning. Following the direction of this intersection, it explores the implications for urban landscape revitalisation, taking a UNESCO cultural-historical city Quanzhou (China) as a case study.
The case study follows a historico-geographical approach to landscape analysis. The collected information is synthesised into the ArcGIS platform to create diachronic models to support the analysis. It presents interconnections of the uncoordinated redevelopment of inner FB, disintegration of the green-space system, and socio-spatial and environmental problems in Quanzhou. An integrated spatial strategy is recommended to retain the connectivity, accessibility, and multifunctionality of its inner FB as UGI for landscape revitalisation.
Sponge City (SC) projects aim to replicate natural water cycles within urban settings, providing sustainable solutions to urban water management. However, there is a lack of understanding on the relative importance and performance of the significant factors that contribute to the success of SC projects. To address this, we conducted a survey of urban water experts from the two distinctive cultures of Australia and China, to generate insights on ‘what makes a successful Sponge City project?’. We also explored the relationships between success factors using importance performance analysis and structural equation modelling. Our findings demonstrate that whilst professionals think that the water management objectives have been dealt with in a satisfactory way, they also find that economic, socio-cultural and design factors are addressed in an insufficient or fragmented way. Our research highlights both similarities and differences in the importance and performance of SC factors in two countries. In China greater attention to economic factors is required, while in Australia policy and governance factors require greater focus. Both China and Australia would benefit from further research on undervalued socio-cultural factors. Most importantly we find that SC projects require greater integration of substantive and procedural factors to address urban water challenges.
For a large part of human history, urbanization was focused on two main objectives: defence and resource harvesting. The first objective was always achieved in a broad sense, i.e., defending the population from other humans and from natural events. Focusing on human activities, this defensive approach was also applied to urban drainage, which resulted in a systematic underestimation of the impacts of urbanization on natural systems. Environmental sustainability was introduced in an attempt to mitigate these impacts, as they had the potential to endanger future developments; thus, the possibility that urban floods may be the lesser evil was accepted. Resilience was then introduced to improve not only defence of urban areas but also their ability to recover from negative events, even though physical resilience is not always accompanied by social resilience. This paper attempts to address the philosophy of urban drainage design, introducing the new concept of floodability as an evolution of flood resilience by identifying its requirements and drivers and by using real examples to present the new concept.
Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are growing faster than in any other part of the world, driven by expanding informal settlement (usually on the urban periphery) and the real-estate sector aiming for up-market property development. The continent currently has the highest real-estate value growth potential in the world. Much up-market property development is currently taking the form of new 'cities'-sometimes a redevelopment of an entire city (e.g., Kigali), sometimes a new city on an urban edge (e.g., Eko-Atlantic, Lagos) and sometimes a new satellite city (e.g., Tatu City, Nairobi). These projects are driven by international property development companies often in collaboration with governments and sometimes with local planning and property partners. All manifest as plans in a new way: as graphics on the websites of international consultants. Most involve no public participation and attempt to bypass planning laws and processes. Producing these new plans (as computer generated images) are a new set of professionals: architects, planners, visualisers, advertising executives and project managers, working together in offices in global capitals of the world. Their aim is commercial. Planning in these projects is no longer shaped by the materiality of the city and attempts to achieve socio-spatial justice and sustainability. Rather planning is shaped by the circulation of graphics through a network of software programmes and marketing professionals. This article will situate Africa's new cities in theorisation of urban development and the role of urban planning through digital visualization.
For the first time in 2019, the Asia-Pacific became a majority urban region. The unprecedented pace and magnitude of urbanisation across Asia and the Pacific has exposed tens of millions of urban residents to heightened risks and vulnerabilities associated with the expanding ecological footprint of urban energy, food and water demands and the increasingly severe effects of global climate change. This special issue directs attention toward the challenges, innovations and examples of best practice in environmental governance for urban resilience in the Asia-Pacific region. Our understanding of urban resilience is tied to the concept of planetary flourishing that links the health and well-being of urban populations with sustainability behaviours that promote regeneration of the biosphere while redistributing environmental risks and benefits in more socially inclusive and equitable ways.
This paper builds on heterogeneous infrastructures scholarship to examine urban electricity access geographies in the Global South. I propose the notion of urban bricoleurs to help understand how the urban poor negotiate changing electrical infrastructure opportunities. Using a Ugandan case study, I present socio-electric stories of residents to show how electricity supply is derived from an eclectic range of sources, and how accessing these sources is negotiated through socio-economic dynamics. These stories suggest that key to understanding heterogeneous infrastructures is recognizing the role that urban inhabitants have in negotiating infrastructure through different movements and connectivities. That the urban poor are best understood as bricoleurs, making creative use of whatever materials are at hand to realize their livelihood needs. This allows a conceptual shift from defining African urban electrical geographies as a failure of achieving grid access, to focusing on how urban residents craft out imperfect, yet functioning, socio-electric lives.
Most estimates of global mean sea-level rise this century fall below 2 m. This quantity is comparable to the positive vertical bias of the principle digital elevation model (DEM) used to assess global and national population exposures to extreme coastal water levels, NASA’s SRTM. CoastalDEM is a new DEM utilizing neural networks to reduce SRTM error. Here we show – employing CoastalDEM—that 190 M people (150–250 M, 90% CI) currently occupy global land below projected high tide lines for 2100 under low carbon emissions, up from 110 M today, for a median increase of 80 M. These figures triple SRTM-based values. Under high emissions, CoastalDEM indicates up to 630 M people live on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100, and up to 340 M for mid-century, versus roughly 250 M at present. We estimate one billion people now occupy land less than 10 m above current high tide lines, including 250 M below 1 m.
The world has made two significant transitions in the new millennium. The first involves the transition to a knowledge economy where the most lucrative industry is now the production and management of information or “data”. “Data” is the new “oil” of our age (The Economist, 2017). The second significant transformation is the transition from a rural to an urban world, a process known as urbanisation. Today most people live in cities (United Nations, 2014). As the world has crossed these thresholds, there are new opportunities to address wicked policy problems such as environmental degradation, migration and climate change, through data-assisted solutions. This book endeavours to provide sound evidence and case studies to support renegotiating the terms for information exchange, ownership and data use in cities for the benefit of urban citizens. In other words, this book is about the best use of the world’s most valuable economic commodity–data—and how it can be used to assist the planetary transition to sustainable, productive, resilient and liveable urban futures.
Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice. The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives, politics and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance and the human right to water and sanitation.
More info at: https://www.routledge.com/Water-Politics-Governance-Justice-and-the-Right-to-Water-1st-Edition/Sultana-Loftus/p/book/9781138320031
Today, there are over 4.2 billion people living in our cities. By 2045, the prediction is that there will be six billion, with most growth taking place in Asia and Africa.
Against this backdrop of rapid urbanisation, increasing disasters, conflict and displacement, and an aid system geared towards rural response, what are the challenges and opportunities of working in urban spaces for the humanitarian sector? And what is good practice in humanitarian action for urban response?
This Good Practice Review is a peer-reviewed book of some 80,000 words. It comprises chapters on context (ways off seeing the city, urban threats etc), themes and issues (corruption, coordination and resilience), tools and approaches (relating mostly to stages of project cycle management), and sectoral responses (such as health, water and sanitation, demining, housing and land rights, and shelter, and others).
The emergence of the climate change discourse in urban planning emphasises resilience as a key concept to deal with issues such as climate mitigation and adaptation, and urban health. What we have termed in this article ‘green resilience’, the coalescence of technological solutions and resilience thinking to solve cities’ ecological issues, is constantly gaining traction in urban planning research. However, green resilience often fails to take into account the socio-political and spatial processes that pertain to the exploitation of land for urban development particularly in the global South. Based on our latest research on two urban megaprojects, in Johor-Singapore (Malaysia) and Doha (Qatar), in this article we build a critique of green resilience and urbanism by leveraging research in the fields of environmental humanities and urban planning.
The essays in this themed collection critically engage with questions of environmental disaster justice from historical and contemporary perspectives. The contributions are geographically centred on urbanising societies in six countries in South, East, and Southeast Asia: India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Japan. Among the first multidisciplinary efforts to develop the concept of disaster justice and to explore it through the lens of Asia's urban transition in the Anthropocene, the intention is to push boundaries of research longitudinally and at multiple spatial scales to identify macro as well as micro levels of disaster causalities and justice issues. Differentiated from such allied concepts as environmental justice and climate justice, disaster justice is concerned with how issues of socioecological justice are brought to the political fore by moments of crisis, rupture, and displacement. Our central premise is that disaster justice is a moral claim on governance, which arises from anthropogenic interventions in nature that incubate environmental crises and magnify their socially and spatially uneven impacts. Posing disaster justice as a problem of governance thus acknowledges that disasters always occur in political spaces, which necessitate more equitable and inclusive modes of disaster preparedness, response and redress for the underlying inequalities that contribute to conditions of compounded risk and precarity. Viewed through the lens of governance, hope is found in expressions of collective agency to effect transformative changes that focus on three main dimensions of disaster justice: the underlying social and spatial processes leading to uneven patterns of vulnerability, participatory forms of disaster governance, and just distribution of resources to support recovery and social resilience.
Understandings of global infrastructure within and between cities have primarily focused on two forms: the node and the corridor. Scholarship detailing the extensive growth of these infrastructures focus on standardization to account for the underlying networks configuring urbanization. However, standardization fails to account for the dynamic, contested and geographically uneven process of infrastructure deployment. Four generative concepts focus analysis on the stages of deployment: speculation, delineating, alignment and pivoting. After discussing China's Belt and Road Initiative as the underlying geoeconomic force driving the transformation of these systems, we present an illustrative case of the Central Corridor linking Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Kampala (Uganda) as emblematic of urbanization through global infrastructure. Concluding, we argue for a research agenda that places global infrastructure at the centre of how we understand urban transformation amid contemporary political–economic turbulence, one that emphasizes the contingent ways deployment proceeds.
Mandalay is a major city in central Myanmar with a high urban population and which lacks a central wastewater management system, a solid waste disposal process, and access to treated drinking water. The purpose of this study is to investigate the groundwater quality of local dug wells and tube wells, determine quantitative data on characteristics of the Amarapura Aquifer, and compare seasonal variations in groundwater flow and quality. Water samples were collected during the dry and wet seasons, then analyzed for major ion chemistry using ion chromatography to identify indicators of wastewater contamination transport to the shallow aquifer and to compare seasonal variations in groundwater chemistry. An open-source analytic element model, GFLOW, was used to describe the physical hydrogeology and to determine groundwater flow characteristics in the aquifer. Hydrogeochemistry data and numerical groundwater flow models provide evidence that the Amarapura Aquifer is susceptible to contamination from anthropogenic sources. The dominant water types in most dug wells and tube wells is Na-Cl, but there is no known geologic source of NaCl near Mandalay. Many of these wells also contain water with high electrical conductivity, chloride, nitrate, ammonium, and E. coli. Physical measurements and GFLOW characterize groundwater flow directions predominantly towards the Irrawaddy River and with average linear velocities ranging from 1.76 × 10⁻² m/day (2.04 × 10⁻⁷ m/s) to 9.25 m/day (1.07 × 10⁻⁴ m/s). This is the first hydrogeological characterization conducted in Myanmar.
Coastal cities are vulnerable to flooding, and flood risk to coastal cities will increase due to sea-level rise. Moreover , Asian cities in particular are subject to considerable population growth and associated urban developments, increasing this risk even more. Empirical data on vulnerability and the cost and benefits of flood risk reduction measures are therefore paramount for sustainable development of these cities. This paper presents an approach to explore the impacts of sea-level rise and socioeconomic developments on flood risk for the flood-prone District 4 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and to develop and evaluate the effects of different adaptation strategies (new levees, dry-and wet proofing of buildings and elevating roads and buildings). A flood damage model was developed to simulate current and future flood risk using the results from a household survey to establish stage-damage curves for residential buildings. The model has been used to assess the effects of several participatory developed adaptation strategies to reduce flood risk, expressed in expected annual damage (EAD). Adaptation strategies were evaluated assuming combinations of both sea-level scenarios and land-use scenarios. Together with information on costs of these strategies, we calculated the benefit-cost ratio and net present value for the adaptation strategies until 2100, taking into account depreciation rates of 2.5 % and 5 %. The results of this modelling study indicate that the current flood risk in District 4 is USD 0.31 million per year, increasing up to USD 0.78 million per year in 2100. The net present value and benefit-cost ratios using a discount rate of 5 % range from USD −107 to −1.5 million, and from 0.086 to 0.796 for the different strategies. Using a discount rate of 2.5 % leads to an increase in both net present value and benefit-cost ratio. The adaptation strategies wet-proofing and dry-proofing generate the best results using these economic indicators. The information on different strategies will be used by the government of Ho Chi Minh City to determine a new flood protection strategy. Future research should focus on gathering empirical data right after a flood on the occurring damage, as this appears to be the most uncertain factor in the risk assessment.
Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is facing notably high levels in current and future flooding. Simultaneously, the ongoing process of rapid industrialization is characterized by the strong emergence of manufacturing firms within the urban area. As manufacturing firms are at the frontline regarding damage caused by flooding, which is often neglected in risk analyses, we argue that the assessment of firms’ exposure to flooding is essential for implementing an integrative flood risk governance. Hence, this study maps manufacturing firms in HCMC, using geocoding based on the Vietnam Enterprise Census (2005, 2015), and assesses whether they are exposed to future sea level rise. The maps developed visualize the expansion of manufacturing firms from 2005 to 2015 and the spatial distribution of firms exposed to future sea level rise in HCMC. Our results reveal that particularly domestic, private micro firms in labor-intensive industries, which represent the backbone of the local economy, are exposed, threatening their competitiveness and viability.
With 70% of its population living in coastal areas and low-lying deltas, Vietnam is highly exposed to riverine and coastal flooding. This paper conducts a “stress-test” and examines the exposure of the population and poor people in particular to current and future flooding in Vietnam and specifically in Ho Chi Minh City. We develop new high-resolution flood hazard maps at 90 m horizontal resolution, and combine this with spatially-explicit socioeconomic data on poverty at the country and city level, two datasets often kept separate. The national-level analysis finds that a third of today’s population is already exposed to a flood, which occurs once every 25 years, assuming no protection. For the same return period flood under current socioeconomic conditions, climate change may increase the number exposed to 38 to 46% of the population (an increase of 13–27% above current exposure), depending on the severity of sea level rise. While poor districts are not found to be more exposed to floods at the national level, the city-level analysis of Ho Chi Minh City provides evidence that slum areas are more exposed than other urban areas. The results of this paper provide an estimate of the potential exposure under climate change, including for poor people, and can provide input on where to locate future investments in flood risk management.
This article explores changing water (in)securities in a context of urbanization and climate change in the peri-urban spaces of four South-Asian cities: Khulna (Bangladesh), Gurugram and Hyderabad (India), and Kathmandu (Nepal). As awareness of water challenges like intensifying use, deteriorating quality and climate change is growing, water security gets more scientific and policy attention. However, in peri-urban areas, the dynamic zones between the urban and the rural, it remains under-researched, despite the specific characteristics of these spaces: intensifying flows of goods, resources, people, and technologies; diversifying uses of, and growing pressures on land and water; and complex and often contradictory governance and jurisdictional institutions. This article analyses local experiences of water (in-)security, conflict and cooperation in relation to existing policies. It uses insights from the analysis of the case studies as a point of departure for a critical reflection on whether a ‘community resilience’ discourse contributes to better understanding these cases of water insecurity and conflict, and to better policy solutions. The authors argue that a community resilience focus risks neglecting important insights about how peri-urban water insecurity problems are experienced by peri-urban populations and produced or reproduced in specific socio-economic, political and policy contexts. Unless supported by in-depth hydro-social research, such a focus may depoliticize basically political questions of water (re) allocation, prioritization, and access for marginalized groups. Therefore, the authors plead for more critical awareness among researchers and policy-makers of the consequences of using a ‘community resilience’ discourse for making sense of peri-urban water (in-)security.
Key policy insights
• There is an urgent need for more (critical) policy and scientific attention to peri-urban water insecurity, conflict, and climate change.
• Although a changing climate will likely play a role, more attention is needed to how water insecurities and vulnerabilities in South Asia are socially produced.
• Researchers and policy-makers should avoid using depoliticized (community) resilience approaches for basically socio-political problems.
In this paper, we outline a framework to study what we have termed “Predatory Cities”, using the artificial offshore island of The Pearl in Qatar as a case study. By focusing on the nexus between urbanisation and resources, we will argue that the master-planning of new cities in the booming global South implies both the access and cheap exploitation of a set of, on the one hand, intangible and, on the other hand, tangible resources that exceed the traditional boundaries. Our point of departure is that the cheap appropriation and exploitation of alien architecture images and resource networks for the making of new, master-planned cities has become a necessary, but highly unsustainable, strategy to survive an increasingly competitive global offering of new destinations.
This paper presents a comprehensive study of large-scale, master-planned urban developments in Asia and Europe. Increasing in numbers all over the world since the 1980’s, these urban mega-projects—here referred to as Grands Projets—have become major drivers of urban intensification. Set forth to actuate urban renewal or to augment city expansion, Grands Projets have become spatial manifestations of cities’ larger economic and political agendas. In their development process, they have triggered a change in the urban condition beyond the very boundaries of their sites. As such, they offer a productive means of investigating current urban trends in a globally connected form of concentrated urbanisation. This research, based at the ETH-Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) in Singapore, examines eight case studies in Asia and Europe through five analytical frames: a project’s conception, design, implementation, operation and implications. This approach addresses various spatial and temporal scales within different theoretical and material practices, allowing a comprehensive discussion of Grands Projets within and across varying socio-political contexts. This paper sheds light on the specific urban conditions of Grands Projets despite their global development trends, transnational owners or financing alliances and internationally regulated planning practices. Often dependent on exceptional regulations outside statutory planning procedures, they are subject to context-specific challenges, project-specific briefs and unique configurations of actors and stakeholders, all of which have created different manifestations of Grands Projets in space. This analytical framework, as presented in this paper, will form the basis of a larger comparative endeavour to be completed at a later stage in our work.
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the full Agenda 2030 in which they are embedded are aspirational and intended to be both transformational and integrative in a number of ways. The need for integration across policy domains is stressed throughout the agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals are also accompanied by an emerging system for follow-up and review centered on a long list of indicators that are intended to enable countries to be accountable towards their citizens. There is, however, in the accountability literature indication that some accountability mechanisms can be counterproductive for integrative policies. This paper is centered around the question whether an accountability regime, and if so how, is compatible with a high degree of policy integration both conceptually and in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. We approach this question through looking both at the literature on integrative governance and some of the central concepts it covers such as (environmental) policy integration and mainstreaming, and the accountability literature. This enables us to provide an analytical framework for evaluating the potential of the emerging accountability regimes for the Sustainable Development Goals to enhance more integrated policy making and action. We conclude that there are little or no strong hierarchical elements of accountability relationships at the global level which can be good news for more integrative policies – but only if there is a strong sense of shared responsibility among actors at all levels, available information on the types of behavioural efforts that support integration, and accountholders that take an active interest in integration. At the national level, there may be hierarchical accountability mechanisms with sanction possibilities that may discourage integration. Here, those who hold actors to account can counteract this if they have deeper understanding of the underlying interlinkages among the goals and targets, and based on this, engage in accountability mechanisms.
The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period. Yet while strike statistics have been collected for many countries since the late nineteenth century (van der Velden 2007),1 until the present no administrative body tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilizations or protests related to environmental issues at the global scale, in the way that the World Labour Organization tracks the occurrence of strike action.2 Thus until the present it has been impossible to properly document the prevalence and incidence of contentious activity related to environmental issues or to track the ebb and flow of protest activity. Such an exercise is necessary because if the twentieth century has been the one of workers struggles, the twenty-first century could well be the one of environmentalists. This Special Feature presents the results from such an exercise—The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice—a unique global inventory of cases of socio-environmental conflicts built through a collaborative process between academics and activist groups which includes both qualitative and quantitative data on thousands of conflictive projects as well as on the social response.
This Special Feature applies the lenses of political ecology and ecological economics to unpack and understand these socio-environmental conflicts, otherwise known as ‘ecological distribution conflicts’, (hereafter EDCs, Martinez-Alier 1995, 2002). The contributions in this special feature explore the why, what, how and who of these contentious processes within a new comparative political ecology.
The articles in this special issue underline the need for a politicization of socio-environmental debates, whereby political refers to the struggle over the kinds of worlds the people want to create and the types of ecologies they want to live in. We put the focus on who gains and who loses in ecological processes arguing that these issues need to be at the center of sustainability science. Secondly, we demonstrate how environmental justice groups and movements coming out of those conflicts play a fundamental role in redefining and promoting sustainability. We contend that protests are not disruptions to smooth governance that need to be managed and resolved, but that they express grievances as well as aspirations and demands and in this way may serve as potent forces that can lead to the transformation towards sustainability of our economies, societies and ecologies.
The articles in this collection contribute to a core question of sustainability science—why and through what political, social and economic processes some are denied the right to a safe environment, and how to support the necessary social and political transformation to enact environmental justice.
We review the increasing body of research on urban water security. First, we reflect on the four different focusses in water security literature: welfare, equity, sustainability and water-related risks. Second, we make an inventory of the multiple perspectives on urban water security: disciplinary perspectives (e.g. engineering, environmental, public policy, public health), problem-oriented perspectives (e.g. water shortage, flooding, water pollution), goal-oriented perspectives (e.g. better water supply and sanitation, better sewerage and wastewater treatment, safety from flooding, proper urban drainage), integrated-water versus water-integrated perspectives, and policy analytical versus governance perspectives. Third, we take a systems perspective on urban water security, taking the pressure-state-impact-response structure as an analytical framework and link that to the 'urban water transitions framework' as proposed by Brown et al (Water. Sci. Technol. 59 2009). A systems approach can be helpful to comprehend the complexity of the urban system, including its relation with its (global) environment, and better understand the dynamics of urban water security. Finally, we reflect on work done in the area of urban water security indices.
A transformation to sustainability calls for radical and systemic societal shifts. Yet what this entails in practice and who the agents of this radical transformation are require further elaboration. This article recenters the role of environmental justice movements in transformations, arguing that the systemic, multi-dimensional and intersectional approach inherent in EJ activism is uniquely placed to contribute to the realization of equitable sustainable futures. Based on a perspective of conflict as productive, and a “conflict transformation” approach that can address the root issues of ecological conflicts and promote the emergence of alternatives, we lay out a conceptual framework for understanding transformations through a power analysis that aims to confront and subvert hegemonic power relations; that is, multi-dimensional and intersectional; balancing ecological concerns with social, economic, cultural and democratic spheres; and is multi-scalar, and mindful of impacts across place and space. Such a framework can help analyze and recognize the contribution of grassroots EJ movements to societal transformations to sustainability and support and aid radical transformation processes. While transitions literature tends to focus on artifacts and technologies, we suggest that a resistance-centred perspective focuses on the creation of new subjectivities, power relations, values and institutions. This recenters the agency of those who are engaged in the creation and recuperation of ecological and new ways of being in the world in the needed transformation.
Mixed-use megaprojects on state-owned land have been increasingly occurring around the world over the past few decades. This article reviews the body of literature that has emerged on these projects during this period and investigates a number of projects more deeply by reviewing original planning documents and undertaking interviews
with government officials, consultants, and other insiders. Project motives, delivery methods, and built outcomes have been examined in order to contextualize their emergence and proliferation, leading to a typological understanding, defined in
this article as competitive precinct projects. A content analysis of 30 reviews covering 42 mixed-use megaprojects in 20 countries reveals remarkable global consistency in thematic criticisms. Framed in this article as the “five consistent criticisms of ‘global’ mixed-use megaprojects,” they pose a significant barrier to addressing increasingly
complex urban challenges as well as to their successful management from inception to delivery. While the consistent criticisms represent patterns that have endured within a globally active urban development type for over three decades, this research shows that rather than being a neoliberal hegemony, there are mixed political and ideological
aims and outcomes across projects and sometimes within the same project. A typological
understanding allows patterns to be examined and understood, variances and hybridity to be evaluated, and more sophisticated future directions to be mapped out in the pursuit of broader based and city-scale project outcomes.
A convoluted network of different water governance systems exists around the world. Collectively, these systems provide insight into how to build sustainable regimes of water use and management. We argue that the challenge is not tomake the systemless convoluted, but rather to support positive and promising trends in governance, creating a vision for future environmental outcomes. In this paper, we analyse nine water case studies from around the world to help identify potential 'innovative arrangements' for addressing existing dilemmas. We argue that such arrangements can be used as a catalyst for crafting new global water governance futures. The nine case studies were selected for their diversity in terms of location, scale and water dilemma, and through an examination of their contexts, structures and processes we identify key themes to consider in the milieu of adaptive transformation. These themes include the importance of acknowledging socio-ecological entanglements, understanding the political dimensions of environmental dilemmas, the recognition of different constructions of the dillema, and the importance of democratized processes.
Flooding is routinely among the most disastrous annual events worldwide with extensive impacts on human wellbeing, economies and ecosystems. Thus, how decisions are made about floods (i.e. flood governance) is extremely important and evidence shows that it is changing, with non-governmental actors (civil society and the private sector) becoming involved in new and sometimes hybrid governance arrangements. This study investigates how stakeholders perceive floods to be governed and how they believe decision-making ought to occur, with the intent of determining to what extent changing governance is evident on the ground and how well (or poorly) it aligns with desired governance arrangements. Flood governance stakeholders were surveyed in five flood-prone geographical areas from Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. The findings suggest that a reconfiguration of flood governance is underway with relatively little consensus regarding the specific arrangements and mechanisms in place during this transitionary period. Across the five cases, stakeholders indicated that they wanted flood governance to be organized at multiple levels, with strong government involvement and with diverse actor groups, and through mechanisms that match the involvement of these actors, with a lack of desirability for some specific configurations involving the private sector in particular. There was little alignment between stakeholder perceptions of governance currently in place and their desired arrangements, except for government involvement. Future research directions highlight the importance of the inclusion of stakeholder perspectives in assessing flood governance, and following the transition in flood governance over time. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
In recent years, urban pluvial flooding caused by extreme rainfall has increasingly occurred across China. This paper reviews the challenges faced by China in addressing urban pluvial flooding and managing urban storm-water, with a particular focus on a policy initiative termed sponge cities. The paper first synthetically presents pluvial flood disasters in urbanized areas, and analyses their causes and formation mechanisms. It then introduces China's sponge cities initiative and discusses policy implementation in relation to contemporary understanding of sustainable urban stormwater management and international experience with innovative practices. The initiative, while theoretically well grounded and appropriate by its design principles, is shown subject to diverse implementation challenges, ranging from technological complexity to limited or lack of governance capacity as reflected in management ideology, knowledge and capacity of learning, participatory and integrated governance, investment financing, implementation pathway, planning and organization, and project evaluation. The paper offers some strategies for addressing those challenges, which include: 1) continuous experiment-based deep learning through pilot and institutionalization of knowledge and information management with city-to-city peering learning mechanisms, 2) establishment of institutional mechanisms dedicated to participatory, coordinated and integrated governance of the policy initiative, 3) increased government role in creating favorable conditions for investments, and 4) appropriate planning and an adaptive approach to policy implementation. The paper concludes that the sponge cities initiative can be an effective approach only if China commits to appropriate technical, governance, financial, and organizational measures to effectively address the challenges for policy implementation.
Purpose
Flooding is an emerging problem in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and is fast becoming a major barrier to its ongoing development. While flooding is presently of nuisance value, there is a growing concern that a combination of rapid urban expansion and climate changes will significantly exacerbate the problem. There has been a trend of population being rapidly accommodated in new urban areas, which are considered highly vulnerable to floods, while the development strategy by the local government still attracts more property investments into the three new districts on the right side of Saigon River. This paper aims to discuss the increase in the number of residences vulnerable to flooding, to underline the need for more appropriate future spatial development. For the vision, an application of compact and resilient theories to strategic planning and management of this city is proposed to reduce vulnerability. This paper also highlights the need to better understand growing vulnerability to floods related to urban expansion over low-lying former wetlands and the more important role of planning spatial development accompanied with transportation investment which can contribute to flooding resilience.
Design/methodology/approach
This research uses combined-methods geographical information system (GIS) analysis based on secondary data of flood records, population distributions, property development (with the details of 270 housing projects compiled as part of this research) and flooding simulation. This allows an integrated approach to the theories of urban resilience and compactness to discuss the implication of spatial planning and management in relevance to flooding vulnerability.
Findings
The flooding situation in HCMC is an evidence of inappropriate urban expansion leading to increase in flooding vulnerability. Although climate change impacts are obvious, the rapid population growth and associated accommodation development are believed to be the key cause which has not been solved. It was found that the three new emerging districts (District 2, 9 and ThuDuc) are highly vulnerable to floods, but the local government still implements the plan for attracted investments in housing without an integrated flooding management. This is also in line with the development pattern of many coastal cities in Southeast Asia, as economic development can be seen as a driving factor.
Research limitations/implications
The data of property development are diversified from different sources which have been compiled by this research from the basic map of housing investments from a governmental body, the Department of Construction. The number of projects was limited to 270 per over 500 projects, but this still sufficiently supports the evidence of increasing accommodation in new development districts.
Practical implications
HCMC needs neater strategies for planning and management of spatial development to minimize the areas vulnerable to floods: creating more compact spaces in the central areas (Zone 1) protected by the current flooding management system, and offering more resilient spaces for new development areas (Zone 2), by improving the resilience of transportation system. Nevertheless, a similar combination of compact spaces and resilient spaces in emerging districts could also be incorporated into the existing developments, and sustainable drainage systems or underground water storage in buildings could also be included in the design to compensate for the former wetlands lost.
Social implications
This paper highlights the need to better understand growing vulnerability to floods related to urban expansion over low-lying former wetlands and emphasizes the more important role of planning spatial development accompanied with transportation investment which can contribute to flooding resilience. Coastal cities in southeast countries need to utilize the former-land, whereas feasibility of new land for urban expansion needs to be thoroughly considered under risk of natural disasters.
Originality/value
A combination of compact spaces with improved urban resilience is an alternative approach to decrease the flooding risk beyond that of traditional resistant systems and underlines the increasingly important role of urban planning and management to combat the future impacts of floods.
All over Europe, post-Second World War large-scale housing estates face physical, economic, social, and cultural problems. This book presents the key findings of a major EU-funded research programme into the restructuring of twenty-nine large-scale housing estates in Northern, Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Policy and practice between and within the ten countries studied – UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and France – is compared. While existing literature focuses on the negative aspects of large-scale housing estates, this book starts from the premise that the estates can be transformed into attractive places to live and focuses on the possibilities of sustainability and renewal through social, physical, and policy actions. Specifically, it explains the origins and nature of contemporary problems on the estates; examines which policy objectives, measures, and processes have had the greatest impact; assesses and compares a wide range of local, regional, and national initiatives; discusses current ideas and philosophies, such as ‘place making’ and ‘collaborative planning’ that are likely to influence future policy and practice; and provides good-practice guidance for neighbourhood sustainability and renewal. The book provides unique comparative insights into the present and future position of large-scale housing estates in Europe.
Connections to place and relations between people are being radically reconfigured in response to climate risks. Climate change is likely to increase the scale of displacement in the Asia Pacific region, leading to intensified patterns of migration as well as resettlement. These two processes, though differing in terms of individual agency and the role of the state, are likely to further exacerbate pressure on urban areas. As the limits to adaptation in risky places are reached, people are increasingly pursuing migration as a way of coping. This strategy demonstrates people’s agency to respond to risks and opportunities. Resettlement, in contrast, tends to undermine people’s agency. This risk response is increasingly being implemented by states as part of climate change adaptation plans, yet, it often results in the creation of new vulnerabilities for those forcibly resettled. Through a focus on the ‘climate hotspot’ of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, this paper explores how communities and governments might anticipate and resolve some of the humanitarian, livelihood and ecological challenges associated with resettlement in an increasingly resource-constrained and risky climate future. The concept of just resilience is proposed as a lens through which the consequences of resettlement for people’s connections to place, each other and familiar ways of life can be understood. It is argued that a focus on just resilience reveals opportunities and threats to procedural, distributive and recognition elements of justice associated with adapting to climate change.
Today the world’s largest economies and corporations trade in data and its products to generate value in new disruptive markets. Within these markets vast streams of data are often inaccessible or untapped and controlled by powerful monopolies. Counter to this exclusive use of data is a promising world-wide “open-data” movement, promoting freely accessible information to share, reuse and redistribute. The provision and application of open data has enormous potential to transform exclusive, technocratic “smart cities” into inclusive and responsive “open-cities”.
This book argues that those who contribute urban data should benefit from its production. Like the city itself, the information landscape is a public asset produced through collective effort, attention, and resources. People produce data through their engagement with the city, creating digital footprints through social medial, mobility applications, and city sensors. By opening up data there is potential to generate greater value by supporting unforeseen collaborations, spontaneous urban innovations and solutions, and improved decision-making insights. Yet achieving more open cities is made challenging by conflicting desires for urban anonymity, sociability, privacy and transparency. This book engages with these issues through a variety of critical perspectives, and presents strategies, tools and case studies that enable this transformation.
Global sustainable governance frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises are already being implemented by multiple actors. These frameworks emphasize the significance of meaningful stakeholder engagement for their effective implementation. Whilst acknowledging the shortcomings and inherent tensions of these frameworks within a neoliberal world order, we also feel it is appropriate to offer guidance in the hope of ensuring a more socially equitable implementation. We call for institutional investors and businesses to engage more with bottom-up approaches to stakeholder engagement where affected groups lead such initiatives. By doing so it would allow private sector actors to have 'meaningfully' engaged with stakeholders as opposed to merely listening. Ultimately, we contend, stakeholder engagement can lead to investment agendas to be included in people's agendas to improve their livelihoods.
Participation with publics' has been embraced in both government and academic literatures as a necessary but currently unrealized means of governing socio-environmental challenges. This near-universal embrace carries global significance. Long-standing efforts in the context of disaster risk reduction (DRR) provide an opportunity to consider how experts have positioned participation such that it can only fail to empower publics. Using interviews with risk managers, we demonstrate that they impose boundaries on participation via application of a deficit model (DM). Despite continuous calls to make governance more participatory, we explore how the boundaries imposed on participation persist because of how experts are expected to do risk management, and how experts understand their occupations. As a result, meaningful publics-experts interactions are bounded into impossibility. Following demonstration of the DM as the essence of how experts conceive experts-publics interactions , using experts' own suggestions for improving risk reduction, we suggest relationship building as a way of reinvigorating participation. We explore how disaster risk reduction grounded in relationships could overcome existing boundaries, offering an easily-applied reconceptualization for differentiating meaningful from superficial participation, as well as a viable alternative to prevailing participatory methods. Given the in-transigence of countless socio-environmental challenges and the need for improved interactions amongst experts publics , the findings offer a novel pathway that may open an avenue to realizing the promise of participation .
This article considers the relationship between forced evictions and the ‘exemplary centre’ through an examination of three urban waterfront sites in Indonesia in comparative perspective. How is the notion of the ‘exemplary centre’ related to forced evictions and the aspirations of marginalised populations in contemporary cities of Indonesia? What are the chances of asserting alternative ideologies when a capital‐centric and modernist vision of the city as ‘exemplary centre’ dominates official planning paradigms? Competing visions of the ‘exemplary centre’ arise from distinct centres of power, from the state level to the grassroots community level; however, the dominant state vision of urban space is often internalised by those most at risk of displacement by modernist projects. Strategies to thwart forced evictions in riverbank settlements in Jakarta, Solo, and Surabaya offer alternative imaginings of the ‘exemplary centre’ – imaginings that enable the urban poor to visualise their hopes and to overcome the spatial uncertainties that characterise their everyday lives. While these efforts indicate resistance to marginalisation, they also provide a distinct kind of ‘exemplary’ vision based on residents’ own understanding of ideal city living. Concurrently, some alignment to existing ‘exemplary centre’ narratives is traceable in the effort to assert these alternatives.
In the 1990s, the "Neighborhood District Improving Program" was established by the Taipei City Government to improve neighborhood environment. The program enabled residents to propose their ideas and undertake design through community workshops. Under the program, a system of “community planners” was also established to provide communities with professionals or trained individuals to lead residents in the design process. These planning and design tools considered community as a coherent social and spatial unit with the stable identity and boundaries and assumed participants to be reasonable and capable in communicating. 20 years later, these assumptions are no longer adequate in the face of demographic and social changes in the city. More recently, a new program "Open Green Matching Fund" was developed to support community placemaking and building of social networks and relationships. Through this program, residents and different social groups are encouraged to develop projects focusing on a wide variety of issues in as many kinds of spaces. Individuals can also self-organize and apply for the grants, beyond the basis of existing communities or neighborhoods. Both public and privately own spaces can be transformed with the program budget. As a result, active community participants have discovered many types of public, private, or semi-public spaces, and transformed them into community gathering places. Initiated and developed by the groups themselves, the spaces are generally well maintained and well used. The process of creating these spaces facilitated building of social bond and new imaginations of the notion of community. This chapter traces the history of community planning policy in Taipei and the context in which the Open Green program has emerged. Furthermore, based on participant observations through the program, it presents three notable and successful cases that illustrate the program’s approach to collaborative community placemaking that challenge the assumptions of stable communities and neighborhoods.
Various surveys reveal that many stakeholders deem current sustainability performance measurement and assessment approaches insufficient for their needs. In light of the large and growing number of publications, this exposes a major practice-research gap. To explore the gap between the flourishing number of publications and the disappointment of stakeholders, this paper analyzes how current literature on sustainability performance measurement and assessment addresses stakeholder expectations. Based on a systematic literature review, the paper distinguishes stakeholders and their expectations on different roles in the sustainability performance measurement and assessment process: standard setters, process enablers, information providers, impacted stakeholder, decision makers, and addressees. The analysis of individual roles reveals that stakeholder expectations are rarely specifically considered; in particular, expectations of decision makers have received little attention in the literature, so far. This paper systematically categorizes the expectations expressed in the academic literature and critically discusses current gaps. The literature review shows that stakeholder expectations have not been considered in depth, which is a possible explanation for the dissatisfaction of stakeholders with current sustainability performance measurement and assessment approaches. Implications for bridging the gap are drawn, including the need for empirical analyses of expectations relating to different stakeholder roles in sustainability measurement and assessment processes.
Vietnam’s Eastern Southern Region is widely celebrated as the ‘engine’ of the country’s economy. Encompassing rapidly developing Ho Chi Minh City and five surrounding provinces, the region’s growth is fuelled in part by the expansion of export processing zones and numerous master-planned development projects known as New Urban Zones. This article documents the ambitions Vietnamese government officials and planners have of transforming the region into a Megalopolis or super-city consisting of a series of integrated satellite cities with Ho Chi Minh City at its core. Because this region of Vietnam does not include any important pre-existing secondary cities of major consequence, however, this megalopolitan model risks cooptation by megalomaniacs, larger-than-life figures driven more by the exercise of power than concerns about the development of an integrated regional plan.
Urban flooding poses significant challenges to cities in Southeast Asia including loss of life, human displacement, and damaged infrastructure. As cities in the region grow and as the effects of climate change worsen, urban flooding is becoming more frequent and severe. This research situates flood governance in Bago City, Myanmar, in the literature on environmental governance and urban political ecology, investigating how local governance actors interpret the significance of flooding and how they promote urban climate governance. Using the 2015 Bago floods as a point of entry, results were derived from semi-structured interviews with (10) government officials and (22) key informants. Broadly, this research found that government officials interpreted the 2015 floods as extreme but also as an example of the government’s increasing capacity to respond to disasters, that local and regional governments lack the human and capital resources to take on the greater responsibility for flood management that they wish to, that government often fails to act on their knowledge about external causes of flooding such as land use and climate changes, and that government officials strategically adopt neoliberal paradigms advanced by international networks while reinterpreting them to advance their own goals of expanding the role of the state.
This volume brings together primary research conducted in secondary cities of Southeast Asia. It provides readers with improved knowledge regarding issues of vulnerability, governance, and climate resilience. The goal of the book and the Urban Climate Resilience in South East Asia (UCRSEA) project is to suggest possible next steps, even as urban systems are dramatically changing in the face of socioeconomic and environmental challenges. The chapter summarizes specific examples from the book drawn from Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. As the authors document, urban citizens most directly affected by climate change lack access to power and need to be able to participate in the creation and implementation of climate-adaptation strategies if they are to be more effective.
This paper considers the land-governance (acquisition, compensation and resettlement) and physical planning (planning permits, development-control mechanism and environmental-impact assessment) processes surrounding Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ) in Lagos, Nigeria, and the effects of the LFTZ on the lives and livelihoods of the inhabitants of indigenous communities affected by the project. The study revealed significant gaps in the payment of compensation and resettlement arrangements, leaving many residents economically vulnerable, and significant gaps in the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) Act, which emphasizes economic development in free-trade zones, without consideration of the social and environmental consequences. A more balanced approach to the megacity’s development is proposed, incorporating social and environmental considerations alongside economic objectives.
In growing urban areas, populations are increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change. Rainwater has been identified as a primary risk, although it is also an opportunity to pursue resilient and equitable cities while regenerating the urban ecosystem. Both urban design and landscape ecology have attempted to define effective responses to urban flooding and their synergy supports novel transdisciplinary approaches. The translation of adaptive management theories to the design process suggests working with rainwater rather than defending against it, combining science and practice. This paper retraces the evolution of design for flooding approaches and outlines the basis of an adaptive urban design for rainwater management.
Introduction Most of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Getting water and using sanitation in cities can reproduce a range and intensity of inequalities, and opportunities for collective action that may not exist in the countryside. The urban poor are entangled with their cities’ economy and culture (Srivastava, 2014). Many work as domestic servants and guards for wealthier households, cleaners for retail spaces and offices, street hawkers and electricians, construction workers and more. The urban poor are a large part of a city’s labor force. They perform jobs no one else is willing to do, work long hours for low wages, and lower the living costs of those living outside low-income neighborhoods (Perlman, 1976: Ch. 8). They seek to survive and to improve their lives through these interactions, seeking education, employment, shelter, security and more. In Delhi and many other cities, the urban poor’s contributions to the formal city occur in the context of “constant, frequently enforced threats of displacement (through ‘slum demolitions’ for example), [and] their never-ending efforts to secure foothold within it (say, by purchasing fake identity cards)" (Srivastava 2014: xxxiv). In the wide range of capabilities sought by the urban poor, and the contexts of displacement, uncertainty and exclusion that they face, water and sanitation may appear to be just two among many exclusions. There is some evidence (Arputham, 2016; Devoto, et al., 2012; Swallow, 2005), nonetheless, that enhanced access to water and sanitation may be a high priority for the urban poor. I explore some possible reasons for this priority below. Some important aspects of urban water and sanitation include: - Providing infrastructure in some neighborhoods, and not others, leading to particular coping mechanisms and power inequalities. - Household water and sanitation replace irrigation as a principal focus of government attention and collective action. - The presence, absence and governance of municipal infrastructure are central to urban water and sanitation. - Water-borne disease transmission may be intensified in dense urban areas. This chapter has a particular focus on informal settlements, such as shantytowns, favelas, bustees and homeless encampments, the unregulated and sometimes illegal, often peri-urban and poorly provisioned settlements where many live and many dimensions of inequality and injustice are pronounced.
These brief notes outline a research agenda for hybrid urban-rural regions in Asia. It emerges from work being undertaken by the Urban-Rural Systems team at the ETH Zürich’s Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. All cities have their hinterlands of one kind or another. We are interested in the hinterlands of cities surrounded by tropical, wet-rice agriculture. Such hinterlands are typical of many parts of Asia, and they have very specific ecological, economic and demographic characteristics, which mean they interact with nearby urban centres in distinctive ways. Most notably, wet-rice agriculture supports relatively high population densities with fine-grained plot patterns. When urbanisation processes interact with such areas, the rural does not immediately give way to the urban and instead a hybrid rural-urban typology emerges. Sometimes dubbed desakota landscapes (Indonesian for ‘village’ and ‘city’), they are neither strictly urban nor rural in character, but a mixture of both.
Cities have started adapting to uncertain climate drivers such as temperature and sea level rise, and some cities are also transitioning towards concepts such as Water Sensitivity. In adaptation planning, flexibility is considered as an important characteristic to respond to changing circumstances. This paper develops a novel approach to identify where flexibility can best be embedded in urban flood risk management systems. The identification of a flexible water sensitive adaptation response is based on change propagation; i.e. the response's ability to minimise negative or maximise positive impacts in urban systems. The Flexible adaptation planning process (WSCapp), comprising change propagation - especially how positive and negative impacts propagate in an urban environment, can be used by those concerned with urban planning and urban adaptation to identify ". where" the flexible adaptation responses can be implemented. WSCapp can be used to decide the type of adaptation response such as changes to streetscape, place making or architectural forms that can best contribute towards the objectives of a water sensitive city.
Flooding is a hazard in many cities despite the presence of flood protection systems. However, recent losses and damage owing to flooding in many coastal cities have indicated that the increasing volatility of natural disasters and flood events are now exceeding present day design considerations. By comparing and deriving common lessons from case studies in New Orleans, Manila, and Bangkok, this paper focuses on the extent to which coastal cities are becoming more vulnerable to flooding and argues that broader urban resilience in the planning process now has an increasing role to play alongside traditional flood defenses. Given the present speed of development in Southeast Asia, there are opportunities for these ideas to be readily and rapidly incorporated into development plans to reduce the severity of increasing flood events in the region.
Positive vertical bias in elevation data derived from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is known to cause substantial underestimation of coastal flood risks and exposure. Previous attempts to correct SRTM elevations have used regression to predict vertical error from a small number of auxiliary data products, but these efforts have been focused on reducing error introduced solely by vegetative land cover. Here, we employ a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network to perform a 23-dimensional vertical error regression analyses, where in addition to vegetation cover indices, we use variables including neighborhood elevation values, population density, land slope, and local SRTM deviations from ICESat altitude observations. Using lidar data as ground truth, we train the neural network on samples of US data from 1–20 m of elevation according to SRTM, and assess outputs with extensive testing sets in the US and Australia. Our adjustment system reduces mean vertical bias in the coastal US from 3.67 m to less than 0.01 m, and in Australia from 2.49 m to 0.11 m. RMSE is cut by roughly one-half at both locations, from 5.36 m to 2.39 m in the US, and from 4.15 m to 2.46 in Australia. Using ICESat data as a reference, we estimate that global bias falls from 1.88 m to −0.29 m, and RMSE from 4.28 m and 3.08 m. The methods presented here are flexible and effective, and can be effectively applied to land cover of all types, including dense urban development. The resulting enhanced global coastal DEM (CoastalDEM) promises to greatly improve the accuracy of sea level rise and coastal flood analyses worldwide.
This edited volume provides a fresh perspective on the important yet often neglected relationship between environmental justice and urban resilience. Many scholars have argued that resilient cities are more just cities. But what if the process of increasing the resilience of the city as a whole happens at the expense of the rights of certain groups? If urban resilience focuses on the degree to which cities are able to reorganise in creative ways and adapt to shocks, do pervasive inequalities in access to environmental services have an effect on this ability? This book brings together an interdisciplinary and intergeneration group of scholars to examine the contradictions and tensions that develop as they play out in cities of the Global South through a series of empirically grounded case studies spanning cities of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe.