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The New Zealand city of Christchurch provides a leading example of post-disaster rebuilding in a Central Business District (CBD) area. In its rebuilding programme, the city has given emphasis to the greening of hospitality and traditional retail space through a combination of development of shared pedestrian spaces (with traffic exclusion and calming) and the integration of greening within the streetscape design. This paper aims to assess whether the development of greened pedestrian areas leads to higher retail spending and, thus, retail rental rates.

This study uses pedestrian movement data collected from several CBD locations, as well as spending data on retail and hospitality, to assess relationships between pedestrian movements and spending. This study explores retail spending in greened pedestrian shared spaces, and explores how this differs from retail spending in traditional street areas within the Christchurch CBD.

Spending patterns are location-related, depending on the characteristics of pedestrian space in the selected area. Greened shared pedestrian areas have the highest spending per measured pedestrian for retail and hospitality, whereas traditional street areas have lower spending for retail and hospitality per measured pedestrian, demonstrating the benefits in redeveloped central city areas.

The scope of smart data continues to develop as a research area within urban studies to develop an open and connected city. This research demonstrates the use of innovative technologies for data collection, use and sharing. The results support commercial benefits of greening and pedestrianisation of retail and hospitality areas for CBDs and providing an example for other cities to follow.

Legibility, intelligibility, mental images and cognitive and syntactical mapping are significant issues that help expose the spatial knowledge necessary for effective urban design. They also help us understand how a city’s new image is forming. This paper aims to present a new holistic approach to define urban design strategies that improve a city’s imageability through cognitive and syntactic concepts.

The study establishes a coherent framework by including residents’ mental images and space syntax theory’s descriptors to understand how residents perceive their physical environment. Using a mixed-methods research design, the authors studied the Iskenderun city center’s image and spatial design. First, the authors used descriptive analysis techniques (questionnaires, verbal interviews and cognitive mapping) and consulted 110 Iskenderun residents. Second, the authors used analytical analysis techniques to investigate the structural relations among city elements with the help of space syntax descriptors.

The results demonstrated the importance of applying combined descriptive and analytic techniques to provide an understanding of the city’s image. The authors also offered a proposal including the appropriate urban design strategies to promote Iskenderun city center’s imageability.

Applying this new coherent framework can support design decision-making for redesigning cities at the micro level and for planning new cityscapes at the macro level.

The fast development of urban movement infrastructures has created neglected urban places in cities. This study aims to provide users’ preferences for designing lost spaces that are a by-product of elevated urban highways (UHs) and bridges to develop a conceptual model for better environmental design.

This research is conducted by a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first phase, to explore the citizen’s environmental preferences based on the Q-sort technique and in-depth interviews, the ideas of 50 users were considered up to data saturation. The preferences of people for designs under urban bridges were extracted by content analysis in the qualitative phase. In the quantitative phase, to validate these preferences, the extracted themes and sub-themes were examined by 144 experts in design studies using the web-based questionnaire based on the first phase outcomes. The validity of the model was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis in SPSS22 and Lisrel software.

The findings show that users’ preferences emphasize design strategies such as safety and security, physical coherence, visibility, vitality, richness, a sense of belonging and comfort to the design of lost spaces. Overall, this study highlights an empirical study into user’s needs and expectations of lost urban spaces.

The findings show that users’ preferences emphasize design strategies such as safety and security, physical coherence, visibility, vitality, richness, a sense of belonging and comfort to the design of lost spaces. Overall, this study highlights an empirical study into user’s needs and expectations of lost urban spaces.

East Lake Commons is a 67 home mixed-use, mixed-income in-fill community in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The community planning process began in 1997, and construction was substantially complete by 2000. East Lake Commons successfully incorporates a wide range of ecological and social concepts, including those of Atlanta Regional Commission and the US Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, the project has established new practices such as Handicap Visitability that is influencing national policy makers.

This chapter examines issues of sustainability in regard to post-Soviet Central Asian urban centers via a case study of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. This urban center of approximately one million people is the largest in the Kyrgyz Republic, and one of the larger cities in Central Asia. Dubbed “the Tree City” during the Soviet Era, it, like other Central Asian population centers, occupies an oasis-like environment at the foot of a major mountain range, the Ala-Too Range of the Tian Shan (Mts.). This major mountain massif, which extends across the northern part of Central Asia and on into North-West China, has numerous peaks more than 4,000 m high and many glaciers. It is these snowfields that provide most of the water used by the city of Bishkek and its suburbs.

The findings represented herein are based on ethnographic field observations and interviews conducted in 2006–2007 and 2013–2014. A variety of documentary resources were accessed as well.

During Soviet times, Bishkek and its environs were the location of industrial complexes focused on the processing of minerals and agricultural produce, much of which was shipped to other republics within the USSR. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of these industrial sites have fallen into disuse and disrepair. So, while Bishkek has numerous “socialist” planned parks, long-established green spaces, and a relatively large “urban forest” along major boulevards and thoroughfares, it is also dotted with abandoned factories, warehouses, and crumbling infrastructure. In parts of the city, and especially around its perimeter, urban fruit and vegetable gardens have reappeared, as many residents had to return to subsistence gardening to provide basic food needs for their households.

In the last decade, however, the local economy has begun to diversify and grow. This has brought more cars to the streets and a substantial number of new businesses and building projects, along with increasing amounts of air, water, and noise pollution. Concomitant with this new development has been the emergence of a nascent green movement, the establishment of environmental organizations, and a small but growing “green consciousness” as witnessed by the creation of new recycling programs, increased bicycle travel, and related activities pointing toward a more sustainable future.

In this chapter, the relative sustainability (social, cultural, economic, and ecological) of this Central Asian urban center are considered as it has emerged from its Soviet past to become the focal point of new enterprises, including a small but growing ecotourism industry. Bishkek, in common with other major cities of this region, which is far from the moderating influences of the sea, must adapt to the realities of what are likely to be increasingly severe climate change impacts – increased average annual temperatures, the rapid retreat of mountain glaciers and a reduction in the essential waters that they provide, and increasingly severe and numerous periods of drought. Whether or not Bishkek can successfully adapt to these changes and emerge as a more sustainable city remains to be seen.

This paper aims to present and describe the main actions carried out in six different faculties and common areas such as cultural and research centres and administrative buildings in the Ferrol campus at the University of A Coruña to achieve the second green flag on a Galician University.

A case study describing the steps for implementing a green campus programme in a medium-size, young university campus integrated into a small city. An Environmental Campus Committee was created to assess the main factors that affect environmental footprint, discuss sustainability initiatives and develop a guide to action regarding different goals related to sustainable transport options, energy, water conservation and waste reduction. The actions included several fields such as education, circular economy and healthy life and involved the on and off-campus community.

The programme achieved a decrease in water consumption and electrical energy. An important change in educational values and behaviours regarding sustainability was observed in and out of the campus community. The measurements adopted mainly in waste management, mobility and education led the Ferrol campus to achieve a green campus flag on November 2019.

This experiment can serve as a guide to establish the Green Campus philosophy in other similar university campuses.

The city of Doha is growing rapidly with emerging urban nodes and centers, housing development. Little attention however has been paid to several growth aspects including the understanding of urban space diversity and the resulting inhabitants' spatial experience, their attitudes toward emerging urbanized spaces. Utilizing a perceptual approach in the form of an attitude survey, this paper explores urban spaces in the city of Doha as perceived and experienced by different groups. An investigation of a number of key urban spaces is undertaken through the identification of key urban nodes that are identified based on parameters that include density, commercial activity, and public accessibility. Spaces are examined from the perspective of Doha's inhabitants using 490 responses to a survey questionnaire. The results delineate that urban spaces lack key conditions amenable to creating urban diversity. Nevertheless, they corroborate the postulation that urban spaces are perceived and experienced differently by different groups based on their gender, age, and cultural background. The paper concludes with suggestions toward a more inclusive approach to the design of the city's urban spaces.