Climate Compatible Development and Rapid Urbanisation in Rwanda

This rapid review uses information from mixture of academic, policy and governmental literature. There is a large literature base on green growth in Rwanda, although evidence on the effectiveness of its interventions or evidence gaps is limited. This review firstly provides a brief outline of the issues related to climate change and urbanisation in Rwanda. An overview of Rwanda’s planning system (policy frameworks, financial mechanisms and institutional arrangements) in relation to green growth and urbanisation is then provided. The policy landscape in Rwanda is a complex one; this review provides a brief overview of the most pertinent national policies and frameworks of relevance to green growth, urbanisation and climate resilient development, although other policies not cited also relate to these issues. The review then presents a snapshot of current donor programmes in Rwanda that relate to urbanisation and green growth, although this list is not exhaustive. Lastly, a section on challenges and evidence gaps follows, although there was a lack of information on explicit evidence gaps. Issues around inclusiveness of urban development planning has been one of the main criticisms of Rwanda’s green growth agenda, particularly in relation to marginalised and poor people’s voices (including women and people with disabilities). Although, recent processes such as reviews of city masterplans have tried to be more participatory. Largely, however, this review is gender blind and does not consider people with disabilities

Luontopohjaisten ratkaisujen käsikirja

ThinkNature project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 730338Nature-based solutions (NBS) are actions inspired by, supported by, or copied from nature, that deploy various natural features and processes, are resource efficient and adapted to systems in diverse spatial areas, facing social, environmental, and economic challenges. The main goals of NBS are the enhancement of sustainable urbanisation (Figure ES.1), the restoration of degraded ecosystems, the development of climate change adaptation and mitigation, and the improvement of risk management and resilience. Moreover, NBS address global challenges, directly connected to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). NBS provide multiple benefits and have been identified as critical for the regeneration and improvement of wellbeing in urban areas, coastal resilience, multifunctional watershed management, and ecosystem restoration. They also increase the sustainability of matter and energy use, enhance the insurance value of ecosystems, and increase carbon sequestration. The vision of the European Commission is to position the EU as a leader in naturebased innovation for sustainable and resilient societies. Establishing an NBS evidence and knowledge base, developing a repository of best practices, creating an NBS Community of Innovators, and improving communication ' and NBS awareness are the main actions to achieve this vision. The added value of the NBS knowledge repository would be better dissemination and visibility, and better uptake and mainstreaming of NBS, as well as contributing to and establishing lively Community of Practice. The evidence for NBS includes NBS case studies, business cases, facts and figures supporting NBS effectiveness and NBS added value, and successes and failure

SEEV4-City Policy Recommendations and Roadmap: Recommendations towards integration of transport, urban planning and energy

This report, led by Northumbria University and POLIS, provides a final analysis by project partners regarding policy recommendations and a roadmap based on the culmination of experiences, learnings and additional research within the Interreg NSR SEEV4-City project. It is part of a collection of reports published by the project covering a variation of specific and cross-cutting analysis and evaluation perspectives and spans 6 operational pilots. This report is dedicated to policies relating to the integration of transport, urban planning and energy

realms of urban design:

The traditional thematic realms of urban design, such as liveability, social interaction, and quality of urban life, considered to be closely related to urban form and specifically to public space, have long since been recognised as important, and have given the discipline a certain identity. The book Realms of Urban Design: Mapping Sustainability is certainly rooted in this fundamental urban design thinking, but its main contribution belongs to the second part of the book’s title – discourse on sustainability. Its chapters, considered as a whole, put forward the importance of the discipline and the designerly way of thinking in the context of the discussion about unprecedented environmental transformation. The eleven chapters of the book represent the major sustainability concerns that the authors have seen as being related to the urban design discipline in their specific professional and environmental contexts. Therefore, the chapters as an entity could be seen as an act of mapping the sustainability issues that are coming “from the front” of urban design research and practice at the universities involved in the project Creating the Network of Knowledge Labs for Sustainable and Resilient Environments (KLABS). They show disciplinary, mostly methodological, concerns with the larger scales in comparison to those of the neighbourhoods and public space that are traditionally connected to urban design; with the collective or common nature of urban space; and with the distinctive, underused spaces coming not only as a legacy of the 20th century, but also as an important by-product of contemporary economic trends. The first four chapters tackle the self-questioning of the disciple of urbanism in the wake of spatial, social, and environmental change at an unprecedented planetary scale. They are assembled around the question of what the sustainability concept means for the discipline and how the discipline should change to become socially relevant in the context of dynamic spatial transformation? The chapters are review contributions to recent theoretical and methodological rethinking of design approaches to the urban condition, with a focus on multi-scale and process-oriented urbanism. The chapters call for an integrated design approach in the sense of finding a theoretical and methodological common ground for separated disciplines of architecture, urban design, and urban planning. The next two chapters examine what is, in the traditional manner, considered to be the main theoretical and analytical focus and the main creative and practical outcome of urban design – the urban form. How we should understand, analyse, and design the urban form in the context of the contemporary complexities of urbanisation? Two chapters present opposing perspectives of urban form design. One is a morphological approach in which the urban form is seen as a disciplinary tool of conceptualisation and regulation of the city, using sophisticated concepts such as landscape and place, while the other maps the urban form as a resident’s basic expression of the need for shelter, territory of everyday use, and cultural interpretation of home, beyond regulation and urban design. By putting the two approaches side by side, the urban form can be comprehended as the simultaneous materialisation and negotiation of the ground of power intentions and everyday practice. Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to a specific dimension of urban design process – participation. Who can participate in the design of territories and places? Who has the privilege to define who will participate? How should an urbanist manage the many different and contradictory requirements? Ultimately, how can people be encouraged and stimulated to take part in the public urban debate? These are the highly important questions rising in the wake of the urbanism crisis, intensified with the disintegration of the holistic expression of the public interest, characteristic of the modernist period. These chapters present a review of important theoretical considerations and recent experience of multi-voice design methodologies. The final three chapters deal with the specific typology of urban space - previously developed and then abandoned, forgotten and underused spaces of an economic and technological past. These reminders of past urbanisation are still numerous in the western Balkan countries. What could the role of these places be in the sustainable strategies of urbanisation? How can the approach to the urban regeneration (planning, regulation, and design) of these spaces be conceptualised in order to be in tune with the ecological and social demands of a distressed planet and local historical and cultural values? By explaining the specific theoretical concepts and western Balkan case studies, these chapters tackle the most important issue related to sustainability and the management of urbanisation - the question of spatial resources

Spatial and Transport Development in European Corridors - Example Corridor: Orient/East-Med; Connecting and Competing in Spaces of European Importance

For four years, a group of experts from public administration, academia and practice has collaborated to highlight the important aspects of corridor development, to provide a first integrated assessment for the entire corridor system and to prepare a draft of an integrated strategy. Of course, this is just a beginning and should be followed up by additional initiatives to produce an organisational framework that will allow intensified collaboration on the corridors, which are so important for the cohesion of Europe. Moreover, we hope that our insights will also stimulate the development of the OEM Corridor and similar investigations into other European corridors. Due to the international nature of the project topic, the working group comprises prominent experts of spatial development and infrastructural engineering from both academia and from planning practice, and from various countries along the corridor

Performance assessment of urban precinct design: a scoping study

Executive Summary: Significant advances have been made over the past decade in the development of scientifically and industry accepted tools for the performance assessment of buildings in terms of energy, carbon, water, indoor environment quality etc. For resilient, sustainable low carbon urban development to be realised in the 21st century, however, will require several radical transitions in design performance beyond the scale of individual buildings. One of these involves the creation and application of leading edge tools (not widely available to built environment professions and practitioners) capable of being applied to an assessment of performance across all stages of development at a precinct scale (neighbourhood, community and district) in either greenfield, brownfield or greyfield settings. A core aspect here is the development of a new way of modelling precincts, referred to as Precinct Information Modelling (PIM) that provides for transparent sharing and linking of precinct object information across the development life cycle together with consistent, accurate and reliable access to reference data, including that associated with the urban context of the precinct. Neighbourhoods are the ‘building blocks’ of our cities and represent the scale at which urban design needs to make its contribution to city performance: as productive, liveable, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive places (COAG 2009). Neighbourhood design constitutes a major area for innovation as part of an urban design protocol established by the federal government (Department of Infrastructure and Transport 2011, see Figure 1). The ability to efficiently and effectively assess urban design performance at a neighbourhood level is in its infancy. This study was undertaken by Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, CSIRO and buildingSMART Australasia on behalf of the CRC for Low Carbon Living