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The purpose of this chapter is to adopt and demonstrate the value of a political ecology approach in examining sport stadia, particularly stadia in the United States. We attempt to highlight how in the development of stadia key decision-makers sometimes overlook questions of community and environmental health and security.

We took an ontological approach in considering what it means for the stadium to exist in the current political ideological time period. For us, this meant raising questions about how we understand the varying human and nonhuman components of the stadium, and how they connect and influence one another. From there, we outline why political ecology is a useful framework for examining the environmental costs of stadia and their development. We utilize the city of Detroit's decision to provide funding for Little Caesars Arena – home to professional basketball and hockey competitions – to argue that investment in sport stadia creates environmental opportunity costs to the “host” community.

In the case of Detroit, we argue that private economic gain took precedence over community and environmental health and security when decisions were made on infrastructure. Specifically, despite the city going through bankruptcy and locking citizens out of water, the decision was made to provide millions of dollars for the construction of Little Caesars Arena and the development of the land immediately surrounding the arena. Through this, we suggest the need to produce informed case studies surrounding the environmental consideration.

The focus on community and environmental health and security is lacking from the discourse of stadia development in the United States. This chapter seeks to bring this consideration to the forefront by offering a way to examine these issues from a political ecological standpoint, and we urge researchers to conduct case studies using a political ecological framework with a community focus.

Climate change is a global threat to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. In an increasingly urbanized world, homeowners play an important role in climate adaptation and environmental sustainability through decisions to landscape and manage their residential properties.

In this chapter, we review the potential impacts of climate change on environmental sustainability in urban ecosystems and highlight the role of urban and suburban residents in conserving biodiversity. We focus extensively on the interactions of homeowners and residential landscapes in urban coastal and desert environments.

Understanding how human-environment interactions are linked with a changing climate is especially relevant for coastal and desert cities in the United States, which are already experiencing visible impacts of climate change. In fact, many homeowners are already making decisions in response to environmental change, and these decisions will ultimately shape the future structure, function and sustainability of these critically important ecosystems.

Considering the close relationship between biodiversity and the health and well-being of human societies, understanding how climate change and other social motivations affect the landscaping decisions of urban residents will be critical for predicting and enhancing sustainability in these social-ecological systems.

The chapter tries to trace the development of concept of urban ecosystem as a problem-solving approach for urban problems, including the unwarranted problems caused by climate change. Urban management has increasingly shifted from infrastructure-based to a more regional-based approach. There has been a shift in the domain of urban ecosystem as well, from the established urbanized area to the aggregation of urban and surrounding rural area. Also, urban-rural linkages are given more attention in resource management in urban areas, thereby reducing the overall risk due to climate change. The chapter provides examples and challenges of urban ecosystem management from across the world.

Changes and transformations experienced today have created alternative lifestyles in cities. Many life concepts try to find solutions to environmental problems, so much so that this section focuses on smart eco-city concept, which is one of the trending city initiatives of the last century and is expected to become more popular each day. In the chapter, firstly, information about the concepts of eco-city and smart city is given and then what is meant by the concept of smart eco-city is discussed. Next, smart eco-cities have been tried to be explained with application examples. Finally, the chapter emphasizes the importance of ecological cities blended with technology for the sustainability of living spaces and offers implications for future research.

The urban heat island is an unintended consequence of humans building upon rural and native landscapes. We hypothesized that variations in vegetation and land use patterns across an urbanizing regional landscape would produce a temperature distribution that was spatially heterogeneous and correlated with the social characteristics of urban neighborhoods. Using biophysical and social data scaled to conform to US census geography, we found that affluent whites were more likely to live in vegetated and less climatically stressed neighborhoods than low-income Latinos in Phoenix, Arizona. Affluent neighborhoods had cooler summer temperatures that reduced exposure to outdoor heat-related health risks, especially during a heat wave period. In addition to being warmer, poorer neighborhoods lacked critical resources in their physical and social environments to help them cope with extreme heat. Increased average temperatures due to climate change are expected to exacerbate the impacts of urban heat islands.

Although people have always been aware of the role and importance of green space, trees, and other nature in cities, wider recognition and policy support is of a much more recent date, for example in the context of current climate and public health challenges. The nature-based solutions concept has emerged as a strong, recent attempt for “mainstreaming” of nature in political, planning, and economic areas. Starting from a description of the role of nature in cities, this chapter introduces the nature-based solutions concept and its current spread and implementation in an urban context. It also raises some questions about the next steps in implementing the concept, perhaps moving away from too much focus on a utilitarian view of nature and ecosystem and toward considering nature as a framework for all planning and decision-making.

In recent years, a great deal of work has emerged on eco-cities in China. Specifically, writers have discussed the role of the entrepreneurial state in the construction of eco-cities and have noted the role of these cities in the production of high-end real estate and new forms of capital accumulation and land acquisition. Whilst this chapter supports these arguments, we argue that the emergence of eco-cities in China is tied up with broader socioeconomic and cultural discourses and discourses of governance. We explore these ideas through a qualitative investigation of an eco-city known as the North Lake (Beihu) Ecological New Town (NLENT) located in the city of Jining, Shandong province. Specifically, this project, which involved the collection of documents, photographs and 20 semi-structured interviews, aims to understand the role that discourses of class, taste and consumption play in the fashioning of Chinese eco-cities. In exploring discourses of ‘green conduct’, this chapter also seeks to understand the role of eco-cities in the governmental fashioning of Chinese subjects and bodies. In this regard, this chapter suggests that whilst new forms of green development have played a part in urban expansion, new green real estate zones such as the NLENT have a powerful role to play in the construction and shaping of Chinese identity and behaviour.

William R. Freudenburg conceived “the double diversion” as the simultaneous process of diverting environmental resources or rights shared by all to a small group of social actors, which was made possible by a second diversion – the acceptance of the taken-for-granted assumption that environmental harms benefit the common good. In doing so, Freudenburg was among the first to note the importance of looking at not only the distribution of environmental harms but also environmental privileges. In this chapter, we extend the conceptualization of the double diversion to include an instance where rather than framing environmental harm as being a public good, environmental action is framed as benefiting the public writ large, while larger issues of environmental injustice are ignored. In particular, we look at the disproportionate distribution of the urban tree canopy in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the framing of the mitigation of the environmental threat of the Asian Longhorned Beetle as a problem for the commons. Through an analysis of media, we demonstrate that organizations and social actors who have tried to address the effects of this particular ecological threat have nonetheless ignored previous disproportionalities in the environment–society relationship.