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United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

E-Books on Sustainable Cities

Smart Cities and the UN SDGs

Smart Cities and the UN's SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) explores how smart cities initiatives intersect with the global goal of making urbanization inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Topics explored include digital governance, e-democracy, health care access, public-private partnerships, well-being, and more. Examining smart cities concepts, tools, strategies, and obstacles and their applicability to sustainability, the book exposes key structural problems that cities face and how the imperative of sustainability can bypass them. It shows how smart city technological innovation can boost citizens' well-being, serving as a key reference for those seeking to make sense of the issues and challenges of smart cities and SDGs.

Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Sustainable Communities Design Handbook: Green Engineering, Architecture, and Technology, Second Edition, brings together the major players responsible for sustainable development at both community and metropolitan scales. The book aims to explain and demonstrate the practice, planning, design, building and managing of the engineering, architectural and economic development of cities and communities to meet sustainable development objectives. Written by an international team of engineers, architects, and environmental experts, this second edition includes new HVAC technologies for heating and cooling, energy effect technologies for lighting, and new construction materials which improve heating and cooling efficiencies. This new edition will also include critical updates on international codes: LEED, BREEAM, and Green Globes.

Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities

Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities explores how to develop emergent smart cities that are rooted in humane, innovative and sustainable values (CHIS). The book considers the move from technocratic and idealized smart metropole to humane cities as a product of fundamental demographic changes, the development of a usage-based rather than an ownership economy, the novel implications of digitalization, decentralization and decarbonization, and Internet-enabled changes in public opinion towards democratization and participation. The book's authors explore seven dimensions and characteristics of humane, sustainable and innovative cities in the developing world: the economy, people, the place, energy and the environment, mobility, social inclusion and governance.

Sharing Cities - a Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities

The future of humanity is urban, and the nature of urban space enables, and necessitates, sharing -- of resources, goods and services, experiences. Yet traditional forms of sharing have been undermined in modern cities by social fragmentation and commercialization of the public realm. In Sharing Cities, Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman argue that the intersection of cities' highly networked physical space with new digital technologies and new mediated forms of sharing offers cities the opportunity to connect smart technology to justice, solidarity, and sustainability. Detailed case studies of San Francisco, Seoul, Copenhagen, Medellin, Amsterdam, and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) contextualize the authors' discussions of collaborative consumption and production; the shared public realm, both physical and virtual; the design of sharing to enhance equity and justice; and the prospects for scaling up the sharing paradigm through city governance. They show how sharing could shift values and norms, enable civic engagement and political activism, and rebuild a shared urban commons. Their case for sharing and solidarity offers a powerful alternative for urban futures to conventional "race-to-the-bottom" narratives of competition, enclosure, and division.

SDG11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

Sustainable Development Goal 11, one of 17 Global Goals that make up the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, recognizes the need to make cities and human settlements 'inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.' This book uses empirical analysis to address challenges associated with the implementation of SDG11. It considers policies, strategies and success stories from various regions, countries and cities, including actions to improve natural resources management, reduce GHG emissions, and develop urban adaptation and resilience strategies and disaster risk management to help decision-makers, planners and practitioners achieve the 2030 agenda.

Websites & Statistics for Sustainable Cities