• Energy Research

Quantitative measures of transport disadvantage are reviewed in this paper from the perspective of their effectiveness to investigate social exclusion. The effectiveness is assessed using criteria derived through a review of the concepts of transport disadvantage and social exclusion and their operationalisation. The specified criteria are related to issues of spatial (e.g., urban accessibility, and public transport accessibility), temporal (e.g., public transport availability, and facility opening hours), and social attributes of travel and activity participation (e.g., personal mobility, and disability). Four groups of transport disadvantage measures are identified and evaluated. These include deprivation-based measures, mobility-based measures, accessibility-based measures, and activity-based measures. The review suggests that although the first three categories of measures have traditionally been used to identify transport disadvantage, they do not satisfy issues surrounding activity participation—the key outcome of social exclusion. The activity space concept is a way in which these issues can be incorporated, as it is a measure of the outcomes of activity participation and their associated travel to that activity. Participation in an activity means that an individual has overcome the spatial, temporal and social barriers of travel for that activity. The research using the activity space concept has, however, inadequately identified individual travel and activity participation. This has been due to a separate application of a range of different indicators to assess activity space size. These indicators are by their nature multidimensional—e.g., area visited, distance travelled, and number of activity sites visited. Although each indicator represents a specific qualitative/quantitative aspect of travel and activity participation, researchers have treated these indicators in an isolated manner to identify transport disadvantage and consequently transport-related social exclusion. This paper identifies the weaknesses and strengths associated with these measures; and methods are directed to overcome the limitations.

This book aims to contribute to the conceptual and practical knowledge pools in order to improve the research and practice on the sustainable development of smart cities by bringing an informed understanding of the subject to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. This book seeks articles offering insights into the sustainable development of smart cities by providing in-depth conceptual analyses and detailed case study descriptions and empirical investigations. This way, the book will form a repository of relevant information, material, and knowledge to support research, policymaking, practice, and transferability of experiences to address aforementioned challenges. The scope of the book includes the following broad areas, with a particular focus on the approaches, advances, and applications in the sustainable development of smart cities: • Theoretical underpinnings and analytical and policy frameworks; • Methodological approaches for the evaluation of smart and sustainable cities; • Technological developments in the techno-enviro nexus; • Global best practice smart city case investigations and reports; • Geo-design and applications concerning desired urban outcomes; • Prospects, implications, and impacts concerning the future of smart and sustainable cities.

Climate change is the biggest global threat of our time. As a signatory nation of the Paris Agreement, Brazil has made a climate action commitment, and expressed its nationally determined contribution to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 37%. The Brazilian population is highly urban, and Brazilian cities are mostly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and the worst effects of global warming are experienced in cities. Hence, the fulfillment of the Brazilian climate commitments depends on the active engagement of municipalities. Nevertheless, the Brazilian national government does not monitor local climate actions, and it is not clear how local urban policy is aligned with climate action. In order to bridge this gap, this study tackles the question of: “Are, and if yes how, cities considering the climate emergency in their local planning mechanisms?” This question is investigated by placing five major Brazilian cities under the microscope. The methodological approach includes literature review and applied qualitative analysis to scrutinize how climate issues and actions are factored in urban planning regulations to verify if and to what extent local policies contribute to the fulfillment of the Brazilian nationally determined contribution, and sustainable development goals. The results disclose that investigated cities have adequately incorporated climatic issues in their urban planning mechanisms. However, policy concentrates more on adaptation rather than mitigation, and policy implementation yet to be realized.

Climate change is an undeniable reality, prompting governments worldwide to devise strategies to avoid or reduce its adverse impacts. Ensuring the effectiveness of these strategies is crucial; they must be both comprehensive and coherent to minimize trade-offs. While substantial research has focused on assessing climate policy coherence within a single level of government (horizontal coherence), there is a relative scarcity of studies examining coherence between different levels of government (vertical coherence). This study adapts an evaluation framework from the literature and transforms it into two distinct assessment frameworks: one for evaluating the comprehensiveness and the other for assessing the vertical coherence of Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs) from three levels of government (local, state, and national) in Australia. Adaptation and mitigation plans were assessed separately for five local government areas in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, and their respective states: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia. National government plans received higher average comprehensive scores (83%) than state (75%) and local (71%) CCAPs. High coherence was observed between national and state levels, with significant variations between state and local levels. Sydney-New South Wales exhibited the highest coherence (90%), while Perth-Western Australia scored the lowest (35%). Key issues identified include a lack of exclusive climate change funding body and an inadequate assessment of vulnerability profiles in various plans. These findings provide insights for designing more comprehensive and integrated policy actions across multiple government levels. The refined frameworks can be applied to test the comprehensiveness and coherence of CCAPs in other contexts at various scales.

In many parts of the world, a rapid urbanization process is taking place at an unprecedented scale, and its drastic impacts on societies and the environment are evident. To combat the externalities of such rapid, and to a degree uncontrolled, development, many cities around the globe introduced various urban growth management policies. However, policy making—to provide sustainable outcomes, while generating growth opportunities—has been a daunting task for urban administrators. To ease the task, scenario-based planning methods are introduced to produce alternative visions for managing urban growth in sustainable ways by incorporating various socio-environmental issues. However, even though modelling urban growth and associated impacts based on these scenarios have emerged to strengthen and quantify the future of urban policies and related planning actions, this process has a number of glitches. Major issues include the uncertainties associated with the selection of suitable methods to generate scenarios, identify indicators to be used to assess scenarios, evaluate scenarios to prioritize for policy formulation, and assess the impacts of policy scenarios. This paper aims to address the challenge of developing suitable policy scenarios for sustainable urban growth. As for the methodological approach, the study undertakes a thorough review of the literature and current practices, and conducts a two-round Delphi survey—involving experts from public, private and academic sectors specialized in the fields of urban planning, environmental planning, social planning, transportation modelling, and economic development. The expert driven policy scenarios are validated in a local context by comparing findings against the policy options as proposed in the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2017 (Australia). The findings offer valuable guidelines for planners, modellers, and policy makers in adopting suitable methods, indicators, and policy priorities, and thus, easing the daunting task of generating sustainable policy solutions.

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is considered as one of the most sustainable neighborhood planning practices, yet relatively little evidence exists on the environmental sustainability of TODs. This study examines transport-related CO2 emissions of TODs in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Individual-level CO2 emissions were calculated for three types of trips (home-based work, home-based school, and home-based other non-work) of 31,101 residents living in TOD and non-TOD neighborhoods. Three multi-level models were estimated, one for each trip type, to identify the effects of TODs on CO2 emissions, controlling for spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependency of the neighborhoods and other confounding effects. Findings show that TODs have the potential to reduce CO2 emissions for work and school trips, but not for other non-work trips in Dhaka. While the results partially verify the environmental sustainability outcome of TODs, how to design TODs to capitalize full environmental benefits remains a challenge for planners in developing countries.

Environmental externalities of the Anthropocene—mainly generated from population growth, rapid urbanization, high private motor vehicle dependency, the deregulated market, mass livestock production, and excessive consumerism—have placed serious concerns for the future of natural ecosystems, which we are a part of. For instance, global climate change—the biggest challenge we have ever faced—is directly impacting wellbeing, and even the existence of humankind, in the long run. During the last two decades, the notion of the smart city—particularly the sustainable development of smart cities—has become a popular topic not only for scholars, particularly in the fields of technology, science, urban and environmental planning, development, and management, but also for urban policymakers and professional practitioners. This was due to digital technologies becoming a powerful enabler in stimulating paradigmatic shifts in urban development-related visions, strategies, implementation, and learning. This paper offers a critical review of the key literature on the issues relating to approaches, advances, and applications in the sustainable development of smart cities. It also introduces contributions from the Special Issue, and speculates on the prospective research directions to place necessary mechanisms to secure a smart and sustainable urban future for all.

Cities are the most dramatic manifestations of human activities on the surface of the earth. These human-dominated organisms—i.e., cities—degrade natural habitats, simplify species composition, disrupt hydrological systems, and modify energy flow and nutrient cycling. Today, these consequential impacts of human activities, originated from population increase, rapid urbanization, high private motor vehicle dependency, deregulated industrialization and mass livestock production, are increasing exponentially and causing great deal of environmental, social, and economic challenges both at global and local scales. In such a situation, establishment of sustainable cities, through sustainable urban development practices, is seen as a potential panacea to combat these challenges responsibly, effectively, and efficiently. This paper offers a critical review of the key literature on the issues relating to planning, development and management of sustainable cities, introduces the contributions from the Special Issue, and speculates on the prospective research directions to place necessary mechanisms to secure a sustainable urban future for all.