BESTUFS policy and research recommendations IV: environmental zones in European cities, accommodating the needs of passenger and freight transport in cities, and BESTUFS Project recommendations

Recommendations report produced as part of the EC-funded BESTUFS project on urban freight transport.

The challenge and response to global tourism in the post-modern era: the commodification, reconfiguration and mutual transformation of Habana Vieja, Cuba

There is a growing literature on the symbolic and cultural meanings of tourism and the ways in which cities are increasingly competing for tourists through the promotion of cultural assets and different forms of spectacle in the `tourist bubble'. To date, research on the role and impact of tourism in cities has largely been confined to those in Western, post-industrial economies. This paper examines the growth of cultural tourism in the central area of Havana, Cuba, and explores the range of unique, devolved, state-owned enterprises that are attempting to use tourism as a funding mechanism to achieve improvements in the social and cultural fabric of the city for the benefit of residents. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of this example for our understanding of how the pressures for restructuring and commodification can be moderated at the city level. Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

Reducing social and environmental impacts of urban freight transport: a review of some major cities

This paper reviews the options available to policy makers in their efforts to reduce the negative impacts of urban freight transport. After providing a summary of the categories of negative impacts that can be targeted together with the specific policy initiatives available, it reviews the actions taken by policy makers across in cities within four countries (UK, Japan, the Netherlands and France). In the case of the UK and Japan attention is focused on a single city as an exemplar of some of the developments. In the case of the Netherlands and France the discussion is wider.

New Principles in Planning Evaluation

Maintaining and enhancing living conditions in cities through a combination of physical planning and environmental management is a newly emerging focus of governments around the world. For example, local governments seek to insulate sensitive land uses such as residential areas from environmentally intrusive activities such as major transport facilities and manufacturing. Regional governments protect water quality and natural habitat by enforcing pollution controls and regulating the location of growth. Some national governments fund acquisition of strategically important sites, facilitate the renewal of brown fields, and even develop integrated environmental quality plans. This book provides recently developed and tested methods for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of planning and policy options. Several contributions focus on new substantive areas of concern in planning evaluation, including environmental justice and sustainable urban development. Applications of evaluation in several planning contexts are demonstrated, and special problems that these pose are assessed. Several chapters address how to communicate the process and results to several stakeholder groups, and how to engage these groups in the evaluation process. Each chapter employs a realworld case in practice, thus dealing with the complexity of applying planning evaluation, and providing practical advice useful in similar situations.

City dweller aspirations for cities of the future: How do environmental and personal wellbeing feature?

This paper explores city dweller aspirations for cities of the future in the context of global commitments to radically reduce carbon emissions by 2050; cities contribute the vast majority of these emissions and a growing bulk of theworld's population lives in cities. The particular challenge of creating a carbon reduced future in democratic countries is that the measures proposed must be acceptable to the electorate. Such acceptability is fostered if carbon reduced ways of living are also felt to bewellbeing maximising. Thus the objective of the paper is to explore what kinds of cities people aspire to live in, to ascertain whether these aspirations align with or undermine carbon reduced ways of living, as well as personal wellbeing. Using a novel free associative technique, city aspirations are found to cluster around seven themes, encompassing physical and social aspects. Physically, people aspire to a city with a range of services and facilities, green and blue spaces, efficient transport, beauty and good design. Socially, people aspire to a sense of community and a safe environment. An exploration of these themes reveals that only a minority of the participants' aspirations for cities relate to lowering carbon or environmental wellbeing. Far more consensual is emphasis on, and a particular vision of, aspirations that will bring personal wellbeing. Furthermore, city dweller aspirations align with evidence concerning factors that maximise personal wellbeing but, far less, with those that produce lowcarbonways of living. In order to shape a lower carbon future that city dwellers accept the potential convergence between environmental and personal wellbeing will need to be capitalised on: primarily aversion to pollution and enjoyment of communal green space.