Charting Livable and Resilient Cities

Cities are facing severe challenges of climate change and environmental deterioration. This leads to diverse reflection and action on urban values, where sustainable development goals are the consensus of future development direction. Positive climate mitigation and adaptation are needed, while creating healthy, resilient, and livable built environments are vital to ensure citizen’s health, safety, and prosperity. However, understandings of theories, methods, frameworks, and strategies for creating climate-resilient and livable environments remain unclear, particularly due to diverse geographic, cultural, social, climatic, economic, technological, and political contexts. The 4th Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability (CCES) and the 3rd Health & Environmental Resilience and Livability in Cities (HERL) international conferences were held in China and Italy, respectively, to address the research, science, and practice challenges to deepening the pathways, actions, plans, and policies. This book collects a total of 32 papers from these two conferences accepted for publication. These papers characterize four key themes, including (i) Urban Design, Public Spaces, and Resilience, (ii) Renewable Energy and Sustainable Building Technologies, (iii) Climate Adaptation Strategies and Environmental Quality, and (iv) Behavioral and Policy Approaches to Climate Change Mitigation. Typically, these four themes form a closed loop to support the creation of livable and resilient cities, by defining urban contexts, mitigation solutions, adaptation solutions, and socio-economic-political participation. Moreover, these papers present the experiences, lessons learnt, findings, and practices from various nations worldwide, such as Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, India, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand, the Netherlands, Togo, United Arab Emirates, and the United States. The contents in this book will provide comprehensive, tangible, and implementable frameworks, solutions, pathways, and paradigms to improve urban livability and resilience.