Sustainability Assessment of Urban Systems

Claudia R. Binder · Romano Wyss · Emanuele Massaro

mar 2020 · Cambridge University Press

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Our world is becoming more urban. More than fifty percent of the global population now lives in cities, which poses new challenges for sustainable development. This book integrates theory and methods of sustainability assessment with concepts from systems science to provide guidelines for assessing the sustainability of urban systems. It discusses different aspects of urban sustainability, from energy and housing, to mobility and health, covering social, economic and environmental factors, as well as the various stakeholders and actors involved. The book argues for the need to find models and solutions in order to design sustainable cities of the future in light of the complexity of urban social life. Including diverse case studies from the developed and developing world, this book provides a useful reference for researchers and students from a broad range of disciplines working in the field of sustainability, as well as for environmental consultants and policy makers.

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Claudia R. Binder is Professor and Head of the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems at École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She holds the Swiss Mobiliar Chair for Urban Ecology and Sustainable Living. She is a leading researcher in the field of sustainability assessment. Her interests lie in inter- and transdisciplinary research to analyze, model and assess scenarios and policies for transitions of urban systems towards sustainability.

Romano Wyss is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He also works as an independent consultant in the field of regional development and sustainability. Wyss's research focuses on sustainable development, resilience theory and energy transitions, linked to social network analysis and transdisciplinary research.

Emanuele Massaro is a scientist at the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He received his doctorate in Complex Systems from the University of Florence in 2014 and thereafter he conducted postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests span the areas of computational epidemiology, urban sustainability and big data analytics.