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Sustainable Cities: Past News & Events

The Heuristics of mapping urban environmental change

Mapping is not only a tool to investigate and capture place-making practices but is itself a means to produce spaces and social relations. Hence, as maps and territories co-construct one another, we ask to what extent can mapping, as a political tool, be a means to contest and re-shape the unjust distribution of resources and opportunities in cities? How can mapping be appropriated by ordinary citizens in their place-making practices? What are the lessons and practical applications that can be drawn from its use in various disciplines?

This research seeks to refine the conceptual and methodological approach vis a vis mapping and develop a heuristic path through an interdisciplinary dialogue. It first sparks of with a literature review on contemporary theories and uses of mapping for place-making. It is then followed by the production of a discussion paper, enriched by a series of workshops with scholars working in the field from UCL, the Polytechnic University of Milan and University of Cairo.

For more information please visit “The heuristics of mapping urban environmental change” Project website here.

For more information or if you would like to participate please contact Dr Adriana Allen, Dr Alex Frediani or Rita Lambert

Urban Metabolism at UCL

Studies on urban metabolism focus on understanding ‘the urban’ through the supply, circulation and elimination of energy and resource flows on which the sustainability of cities and the everyday life practices of urban dwellers depend. This concept has influenced multiple strands of discipline-bounded work, each with a distinct understanding of what urban metabolism stands for.

Vanesa Castán Broto and Adriana Allen have led a short study at the UCL Environment Institute within the research theme of sustainable cities, to foster interdisciplinary dialogue around urban metabolism. The project included two strands of research: the first one, developed in collaboration with Andreas Eriksson, consisted of qualitative research to explore the perspectives of scholars in UCL who are engaged directly or indirectly with urban metabolism; the second one, developed in collaboration with Elizabeth Rappoport, consisted of an interdisciplinary literature review on the concept of urban metabolism.

Project outputs:

· Urban metabolism at UCL

· Interdisciplinary literature review on urban metabolism

For more information please visit the Urban Metabolism Project website here.


Further work

In 2012, the project will be followed up with the development of a film output from the interviews and an event to bring interdisciplinary researchers together. For more information or if you would like to participate please contact Vanesa Castán Broto or Adriana Allen at the Development and Planning Unit.

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[water: ]Glass half empty? Urban water poverty halfway through the Decade of Water for Life.

Edited by Adriana Allen and Sarah Bell

In 2000 the United Nations included targets to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe water and sanitation in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and in 2005 it launched the Decade of Water for Life. We are now more than halfway through that decade and only four years away from the 2015 deadline set by the MDGs, a useful point to reflect on current research and action in relation to the problem of urban water poverty.

Urban water poverty has its roots not in water scarcity but in social inequity. Every day, 180,000 people are added to the world’s urban population. One-sixth of the world’s population lives in slums or squatter settlements, most without access to adequate water and sanitation and at risk of being evicted. The urban poor often spend up to 25% of their income on water.

This special issue of the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development brings together diverse interdisciplinary perspectives around the important issue of urban water poverty. Contributions were triggered by a symposium held at University College London organised by the guess editors in 2010 and seek answers to the following questions: What do we know about urban water poverty and how to tackle it? What additional conceptual frameworks can shed light into the way in which water material and immaterial flows produce cities and accumulation and deprivation within them? What needs to be done differently if we are to put this knowledge into practice up to and beyond 2015?

Papers address urban water poverty issues from disciplines such as development studies, hydrology, engineering, sociology and urban geography, and include case studies from Dhaka, Bogotá, Mexico City, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Lusaka, Caracas, Cairo and Dar es Salaam.

The collection represents a diversity of approaches and the need for rigorous evidence to support policy making as well as critical thinking and engagement to ensure the needs of the urban poor are met when decisions are made about urban water management.