Urban Social Sustainability (Routledge Studies in Sustainability)

This ground breaking volume raises radical critiques and proposes innovative solutions for social sustainability in the built environment. Urban Social Sustainability provides an in-depth insight into the discourse and argues that every urban intervention has a social sustainability dimension that needs to be taken into consideration, and incorporated into a comprehensive and cohesive ‘urban agenda’ that is built on three principles of recognition, integration, and monitoring. This should be achieved through a dialogical and reflexive process of decision-making. To achieve sustainable communities, social sustainability should form the basis of a constructive dialogue and be interlinked with other areas of sustainable development. This book underlines the urgency of approaching social sustainability as an urban agenda and goes on to make suggestions about its formulation.

Urban Social Sustainability consists of original contributions from academics and experts within the field and explores the significance of social sustainability from different perspectives. Areas covered include urban policy, transportation and mobility, urban space and architectural form, housing, urban heritage, neighbourhood development, and urban governance. Drawing on case studies from a number of countries and world regions the book presents a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding from social sustainability in urban settings, and provides practitioners and policy makers with innovative recommendations to achieve more socially sustainable urban environment.

M. Reza Shirazi is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD), UC Berkeley, and Senior Research Fellow at the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, UK. His research and teaching interests lie in the field of urban justice, discourse studies, neighbourhood development, citizen participation, phenomenology of the built environment, sociocultural sustainability, and architectural and urban transformation in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries. Reza’s recent books include: Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism in Iran: Tradition, Modernity, and the Production of ‘Space-In- Between’ (Springer, 2018), Citizens’ Participation in Urban Planning and Development in Iran; Challenges and Opportunities (Routledge, 2017); and Towards an Articulated Phenomenological Interpretation of Architecture: Phenomenal Phenomenology (Routledge, 2014).

Ramin Keivani is Professor of International Land Policy and Urban Development and Research Lead at the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University. He is an urbanist with a particular research interest in low-income and affordable housing policy, urban social sustainability, and the impact of land and property markets on urban development and urban equity in both developed and transition economies. He has worked on projects across the globe including UK, central/eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, Brazil, China and Asia Pacific, and southern Africa. He is the founding and managing editor of the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development.