Towards the development of an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment framework of urban green growth interventions

Considering the current emerging demographic, urbanization and climatic trends, integrating sustainability and resilience principles into urban development becomes a key priority for decision-makers worldwide. Local and national governments, project developers and other urban stakeholders dealing with the complexities of urban development need projects with clear structure and outcomes in order to inform decision-making and ensure sources of financing. The need for developing an integrated assessment methodology that would capture and quantify multiple urban sustainability and resilience benefits of projects in one common framework and eventually lead to verifiable sustainability and resilience outcomes is immense and challenging at the same time. The main objective of this paper is to present the development of a methodological approach that aims to integrate sustainability and resilience benefits, derived from the implementation of green growth urban projects, into a unified framework of criteria addressing environmental, social, economic and institutional perspectives. The proposed sustainability and resilience benefits assessment (SRBA) methodology is a combination of top down and bottom up approaches, including GIS-based scenario building. The different types of sustainability and resilience benefits of urban green growth projects are also identified at different levels (i.e., individual, neighborhood, city and global). Moreover, the proposed methodology creates scenarios that can be illustrated by a map-based approach to enable a better illustration and visualization of benefits. It demonstrates how a map-based approach can assess not only the extent of sustainability and resilience benefits accrued (how much is benefitted), but also their spatial distribution (who is benefitted). The main methodological challenges and issues on developing an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment are identified and discussed

Community-based initiatives in the urban realm what conditions their performance?

A city is a place where many initiatives, people, and social and urban challenges meet. This article brings together the cumulative knowledge of eight researchers who have been studying community-based initiatives (CBIs) via case studies in various countries. In some countries, citizens were not satisfied with government-provided services, or services were l

The role of knowledge institutions in placemaking

Urban development is increasing in its complexity. Processes that transform urban areas are not steered by the public sector or private enterprises alone. Hybrid forms of urban development are emerging, with a gradually bigger role given to citizens’ initiatives and selforganization. This favours also the involvement of knowledge institutions that add to new models of innovation by actively contributing to and partnering with public and private initiative