Eco-Cities

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of a number of urban projects which, under the banner of experimentation, have promoted alternative models of city-making capable, in theory, of creating sustainable built environments. Among these supposedly experimental models, the smart city and the eco-city stand out in terms of geographical diffusion, and are hailed by their advocates as the mark of an innovative urbanism based on a scientific approach to urban development. Through the analysis of Hong Kong and Masdar City, examples of a smart-city agenda and an eco-city project respectively, this paper questions the sustainability of so-called smart cities and eco-cities, by investigating the extent to which they are developed in a controlled and systematic manner as their developers claim. More specifically, the paper counterclaims mainstream understandings of smart and ecological urbanism, arguing that what are promoted as cohesive settlements shaped by a homogeneous vision of the sustainable city, are actually fragmented cities made of disconnected and often incongruous pieces of urban fabric. Theoretically, these claims are discussed through the concept of Frankenstein urbanism which draws upon Mary Shelley's novel as a metaphor for unsuccessful experiments generated by the forced union of different, incompatible elements.

This chapter explores the notion and practice of the smart city, with a geographical focus on Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. Smart-city projects are understood and discussed as the products of overarching political economies whose objectives are pursued through a fast-track urbanisation. The case of Abu Dhabi shows that smart-city initiatives are connected to the state's goals of changing its economic base and preserving the political status quo, through the development and commercialization of smart-clean technology. In this sense, the smart city, as a living laboratory meant to produce new cleantech products, such as smart grids and state-of-the-art solar power stations, becomes the physical locus where new strands of the regional economy are cultivated. Through the example of Masdar City, a new high-tech district under construction in Abu Dhabi, the chapter unpacks and critiques the contradictions between the economic imperatives that underpin so-called smart interventions and their overall sustainability, revealing that, as in most cases of ecological modernisation, socio-environmental concerns are overshadowed by business interests. We conclude that, in addition to being ineffective against the majority of the social and the environmental problems caused by cities, by supporting transnational capitalist machines of production and consumption, smart-city solutions risk to backfire and exacerbate the same vicious circle that they should be breaking.

This book chapter is an early version of Cugurullo 2018. Although similar in nature, this chapter explores aspects of experimental urbanism, such as the decomposition of the urban fabric of eco-city projects, which are not discussed in its later incarnation in Environment and Planning A.

Civilization has entered into a pivotal yet delicate transition of epoch, where the “business as usual” model of living is deemed as not sustainable for future generations on this resource-finite earth we call home. The ur- gency to decide where do we go from here and how do we proceed as individuals, members of communities, on up to cities and nations has been often asked yet never clearly explained. Pursuing sustainability on almost every front of ecological, economic and social conduct has become the “new norm.” Litfin’s book Ecovillages: Lesson for Sustainable Community offers an inspiring perspective on upscaling the principles from the global ecovillages that she visited to “glean for lessons” that can be applied in our daily lives, and, more importantly, translates this thinking into action.

This research examines the 21st century’s future urban planning theories and in this context future housing projects and housing models. In the beginning of the 20th  century, İstanbul city  first planned by the French planner Henri Prost seen as modernization project. His projects have left permanent marks in the city over the a century including H. Prost period and post-Prost era. The city has changed and transformed as an Metropolitan city within the years with the mass migrations by making housing problem more complicated. The city centers overpopulated with migrations, the city started to sprawl out of the city periphery to the green areas, woods, forests, lakes, water basins, etc. with new housing projects. In the late 20th century, new urban planning theories emerged with the climatic concerns like green urbanism and eco-design which is radically began to transform the cities recently.  Although Istanbul has changed and developed over the years with the problems, the future models are seen  solution to these problems. By the 21st century new urban-scale projects planned in İstanbul accordance ecological and innovative urban theories to design the future cities;  the sustainable or eco-cities in natural urban eco-system in K. Çekmece region and an urban-scale a gentrification project of old industrial zone in Kartal by parametric architecture. These projects planned  by the worlds leading architects ; Zaha Hadid and Ken Yeang.

This article uses the narrative tool of a walk through Tianjin Eco-City, China, as an entry point in raising and discussing key questions in contemporary eco-city research. Eco-city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and political-economic discourses in a variety of locations as new urban spaces where blueprints for low carbon economies can be trialled. In light of this, the article highlights the key necessity of, firstly, considering scale when analyzing eco-city ‘futures’. Secondly, the article argues for the need to interrogate eco-cities’ definitions, as well as evaluation, performance and monitoring frameworks, as this will aid in critical analyses of the marketing, presentation and actually built urban environments in eco-city projects. Thirdly, the question of internal social resilience and the emergence of communities within newly-built eco-cities needs to be assessed: this is of crucial importance in light of the exclusive, gated nature of several flagship eco-city projects under construction at the time of writing. Lastly, the article argues that research on eco-city projects needs to consider not only the high-tech, new urban environments materialized as eco-cities, but also the production and reproduction of large, often transient populations of low-paid workers who build eco-cities and who form what the article calls the ‘new urban poor’, forming ‘workers’ cities’ on the edges of flagship ‘sustainable’ urban projects worldwide.

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

The development of projects for new eco-cities is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon. Alleged eco-cities are being built across a variety of spaces via processes of urbanisation triggering substantial environmental, social and economic impacts. This article investigates how new eco-city projects interpret and practice urban sustainability by focusing on the policy context that underpins their development. The article argues that projects for new eco-cities are shaped in loci by policy agendas tailored around specific economic and political targets. In these terms, the ideas and strategies of urban sustainability adopted by eco-city developers are understood as reflections of broader policy priorities. The case study employed in this article, Masdar City, reveals how the Emirati eco-city initiative is the product of local agendas seeking economic growth via urbanisation to preserve the political institutions of Abu Dhabi. Following the economic imperatives set by the ruling class, the Masdar City project interprets sustainability as ecological modernisation and practices urban environmentalism almost exclusively in economic terms. The article shows how the developers of Masdar City capitalise on sustainability by building an urban platform to develop and commercialise clean-tech products, and concludes that the Emirati alleged eco-city is an example of urban eco-modernisation: a high-tech urban development informed by market analysis rather than ecological studies.

The mega-project of Eko Atlantic, a new city built on reclaimed land just offshore of Lagos, is promised to mitigate climate change and simultaneously adapt Lagos to it through an eight kilometres long ‘Great Wall of Lagos’. The project is being lauded internationally. Not only for its eco-friendliness, but also for the economic opportunities it provides as West Africa’s new financial centre. On the other hand Eko Atlantic is subject to severe criticism for being a case of disaster capitalism or ‘climate change apartheid’ in which the ultra-rich buy off their exposure to the effects of climate change, and exclude the poor and vulnerable masses of Lagos from protection to rising sea levels.

This book tells the story of visionary urban experiments, shedding light on the theories that preceded their development and on the monsters that followed and might be the end of our cities. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences that are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans. The book empirically explores Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong to provide a critical analysis of eco and smart city experiments and their sustainability, and it draws on numerous real-life examples to illustrate the rise of urban artificial intelligences across different geographical spaces and scales. Theoretically, the book traverses philosophy, urban studies and planning theory to explain the passage from eco and smart cities to the autonomous city, and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of cities in a time when human and non-biological intelligences are irreversibly colliding in the built environment. Iconoclastic and prophetic, Frankenstein Urbanism is both an examination of the evolution of urban experimentation through the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and a warning about an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein's monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding. Academics, students and practitioners will find in this book the knowledge that is necessary to comprehend and engage with the many urban experiments that are now alive, ready to leave the laboratory and enter our cities.

The design of sustainable communities and cities requires conceptual frameworks for contextualization and
transdisciplinary integration. The theory of complex dynamic systems provides a holistic, explanatory frame-
work offering a participatory perspective that recognizes the fundamental interconnectedness, interdependence,
and unpredictability of biological, social, economic, and ecological systems. Building on the tradition of urban
planning within a regional context, to conceive the sustainable city as an emergent property of appropriate
interactions and relationships within a complex, holarchically structured whole, takes contextualization further.
Increased awareness of nature and culture as an interconnected complex dynamic system, and sensitivity to
material and immaterial (psychological) aspects, leads to more sustainable solutions based on transdisciplinary
integration. Worldviews and value systems, and ecological literacy play an important role in the creation of sus-
tainable lifestyles, communities, cities and societies. This article suggests that complexity theory, combined with
aspects of integral theory and integral ecology, when applied through design as a transdisciplinary integrator, can
provide a framework and a methodology that links spatial and temporal scales across all scales of design from
product design, architecture, construction ecology, community design, industrial ecology, to urban and biore-
gional planning. Ultimately, a sustainable city emerges from the interactions among sustainable communities of
ecologically and socially literate citizens who live sustainable lifestyles.

This chapter unpacks the imaginary of the smart city, taking the reader on a journey which, across time and space, explores the intellectual foundations of the key ideas, images and visions underpinning the theory and practice of smart urbanism. Starting from Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the chapter examines the origins of the synergy between technological development and urban development, that today characterizes the smart-city phenomenon. The same thematic thread is then followed through the history of the city, with an emphasis on Modernism when technological innovation begun to be deeply embedded in city-making. By connecting the philosophy of Nietzsche to the work of Expressionist architects and Futurist artists, the chapter emphasizes the stark individualism permeating the spirit of modernity. The chapter then discusses the cases of Los Angeles and Singapore, as the first incarnations of the computer city and the intelligent city respectively. Finally, current smart-city initiatives are critiqued through the lens of Max Horkheimer's critical theory. More specifically, the chapter draws upon Eclipse of Reason, to argue that the recent dreams of smart urbanism are but a rerun of traditional capitalistic ambitions which, masked by the promise of technological progress, target the interests of elites, and neglect the progress of society and the preservation of the natural environment.

How can we avert ecological catastrophe and avoid social collapse? What is the practical relevance of ethics and philosophy? How can we build community?  In the forthcoming book, Being and Place,  I address the question of why, despite a wealth of knowledge and know-how,  we are failing to respond to social and ecological crisis and bring about the ecological society.  The book presents alternative ways of life that can help us create an ecological society. The solutions to our crises, I argue, are within our grasp and can be achieved through practising a notion of eco-praxis. The key question is this: Is humanity capable of creating institutions and sustaining practices that are geared to the long-range collective good, or are we irrevocably  short-term thinkers?  I do emphasise agency, meaning, will and values in a participatory and creative universe.

My main purpose in this book is to provide a diagnosis of the social, moral and ecological failures of modernity, going on to emphasise solutions, transitions, practices and transformations bringing out the social-ecological society - the Ecopolis.  I work in the tradition of virtue ethics and am developing the notion of ecological virtue. You can call the virtues qualities for successful/sustainable living, and such qualities are to be defined in terms of the ecological conditions for human and planetary flourishing. If that sounds arcane or abstruse think of it in these terms, our current form of socialisation is concerned with shaping people to be producers geared to the endless accumulation of material quantities and consumers forever running on the hedonistic treadmill. The truth is that the vices of endless production – production for the sake of production, accumulation of means for the sake of means is without end and is a nihilism - and overconsumption are undermining the social and ecological bases of civilised life.

All of which begs the question of how to create the ‘happy habitus’ (eudaimonia = flourishing) which enables us to acquire and exercise the virtues, construct the right character, develop the right habits and create capabilities. Within prevailing social relations, there is no necessary connection between the individual/private good and the social/ecological/public good. That means that the common good is something abstract and that all appeals to such a good are lacking in social relevance; they presume a social identity that does not exist. The kind of identity presupposed by the modern market society within which we live is that of the self-interested individual whose own good may well be achieved in ways detrimental to the overall social and ecological good. Any overall good that may result from such self-interested behaviour is indirect. To demand that such an individual serve the common good and live the virtuous life is to expect an altruism which, within prevailing social relations, is irrational, a sacrifice of a tangible and immediate individual self-interest for a vague and intangible general interest. The result, though, is that individual freedom and reason generates a collective unfreedom and unreason (call it the crisis in the climate system and looming eco-catastrophe). As social beings, our lives are governed by collective forces. The problem is that we lack appropriate mechanisms of collective control capable of governing those forces. We require a social identity that establishes a direct connection between individual and social good so that responding to appeals to the common good would indeed be rational and require no irrational sacrifice of self-interest. An identity of this kind is not available within the instrumental market relations upon which society is patterned. Here, individual identity is constituted by abstraction, and the good is defined in terms of private acquisition and enjoyment. Such identity is the polar opposite of the identity given by participation in the politics and culture of the public life we need in order to be ourselves.

In my current work, I argue not only for a recovery of virtue ethics, but for its extension as a conception of ecological virtue. This alone is insufficient, creating just another socially impotent and irrelevant ethic to join the club of warring gods in the modern world. We are not short of competing moralities, value judgements with no claim on society other than personal preference. The attempt to rework an ethic of virtue can only succeed if the context has been created to enable the social identity required by that ethic, a social identity which connects individual self-interest and the social interest. Only such a social identity serves to check the problem of the free rider. Without that identity, there is no connection between individual action and overall good, something which inhibits the individual from engaging in action for the greater good.

Launched in May 2011, the new global magazine Southern Innovator is about the people across the global South shaping our new world, eradicating poverty and working towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
They are the innovators.

Issue 1 covered the theme of mobile phones and information technology. Issue 2 covered the theme of youth and entrepreneurship. Issue 3 covered the theme of agribusiness and food security. Issue 4 covers the theme of cities and urbanization.

A growing body of critical literature seeks to identify conceptual and practical problems accompanying the realisation of mainstream ‘eco-city’ initiatives around the world. However, little attention has been paid to the status of the ‘city’ itself within the broader discourse. If eco-cities are to be more than experimental ‘technological showcases’, and aim to transform urban life more generally, the question of what types of ‘cityness’ will ensue is of considerable importance. To effect a more significant sustainability transition, eco-city plans and policies may need somehow to encompass a more nuanced conceptualisation of cities as complex, unpredictable, and emergent spaces. The incompatibility of such a conceptualisation with liberal-modernist modes of planning means that radically innovative new approaches to eco-city development may need to be found.

This thesis considers whether the eco-city, theorised as a multiple process of real-world experimentation, may shed some light on how ‘cityness’ might better be planned for in future. To do so, it conceptualises cityness through the lens of ‘publicness’. It makes an original contribution to knowledge by developing a new theoretical model of publicness as an ‘assemblage’ of space and behaviour, with an ‘emergent’ and ‘civic’ modality. It thereby extends recent debates over the idea of ‘urban assemblage’, and makes innovative links between theories of planning and of the public. This model informs the analysis of original empirical research, investigating the conceptualisation of the public in an international sample of official eco-city documents, and exploring the publicness of two implemented initiatives, in Portland, Oregon (US) and newly built Sejong City (South Korea).

The research finds that publicness tends to be poorly articulated in mainstream eco-city plans and policies, with potentially negative implications for sustainability in the ‘urban age’. However, it also argues that state institution-led planning – even when experimental ‘governance’ approaches are adopted – may inevitably be limited in its ability to encompass the emergent public life of the city. The thesis concludes by considering the prospects for overcoming or more productively acknowledging these limits in future.

Drawing on examples from various cities, the chapter traces the convergence between eco-urbanism and smart urbanism in the past two decades. The chapter begins by tracing the eco-city and smart city's conceptual trajectories, before moving on to consider how these have become enmeshed into what has been called the 'smart eco-city' from the mid-2010s onwards. The chapter then moves on to consider, briefly, the broad terrain around the 'green economy'. The smart eco-city is placed within a broader concern with harnessing Big Data, the Internet of Things, digital lifestyles and infrastructures to connect the urban to green economy visions, strategies and pathways. Concluding, the discussion highlights the divergence between mainstream smart eco-urbanism and potential alternatives that emerge when considering urban social sustainability more closely.

Eco-city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low-carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco-city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco-city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco-cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings' climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco-cities, to provincial, regional and state-level plans for the integration of eco-cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco-city under construction at the time of writing.

Caofeidian International Eco-City, in North-East China, is among several large-scale new eco-city initiatives currently in development across Asia. Built from scratch across an area of 74 km2, with an expected population of 800,000 by 2020, the city's plan boasts an abundance of urban sustainability features, from integrated public transport services and advanced water and waste recycling systems, to public parks and an extensive wetland area. This article uses the historical and conceptual perspective of “techno-city” to analyze the city's urban technology features. It highlights the relationship between the city and its hinterland, discusses the focus on science and technology driving the city's concept, and explores the international, modernist design language used. In doing so, the analysis points to several key tensions and contradictions at work, including a disconnect between the city's green technology focus and the high-carbon heavy industry of the surrounding area, and a lack of engagement with the local culture and community. Caofeidian Eco-City exhibits several features of twentieth-century techno-cities, although these are re-cast within the twenty-first-century context of global climate change policy and China's ongoing rapid urbanization processes.

Eco Cities are known as a viable solution for increasing challenges of urbanization. Most of the eco-cities in the world are facing the issues of functionality while the planning has backed by sustainable urban design principles. This study exerts the critical aspects which affect on the sustainability of eco-city development. The evaluation is based on two case studies as Tianjin Eco-City in China and Masdar Eco-City in UAE.

This chapter focuses on the recent trend in some geographical locations (particularly China and the United Arab Emirates) towards building large-scale low-carbon city projects. These low-carbon cities are increasingly being described as mega-projects due to their scale and involvement of large-scale experimental approaches to ways of organizing the low-carbon city. The chapter discusses some of the main trends towards the development of low-carbon eco-city projects since 2000, and then introduces the two main low-carbon city mega-projects currently being developed.

Royal Indian Raj International Corporation (RIRIC) today announced that it has secured a GBP 300 million (US$547 million) equity commitment structured as an equity line of credit through UK-based GEM Global Emerging Markets' Global Yield Fund.

The marketing mix models proposed to this day do not support the management of micro connexions and virtual networks linked to a given product with all its ramifications in the chain of business and economic networks. This article provides answers to these theoretical and practical preoccupations and contributes to digital life management in the context of Sustainable Development (SD) with efficient use of virtual networks, Information Analysis Technology (IAT)… It conceptualizes a model of “green” quantum / numeric marketing mix in 5P (Price, Product, Promotion, Place and puce).
The research method is based on case study approach. The methodological approach for making an application to a fuel distribution company, the group's 11th-largest global oil companies is presented in this article. At this stage of this research, the model uses proactive approaches, forward-looking and subject to the "strategic imagination." It also puts in a very similar use of quantum networks (2020).

Fuelled by an increasing diffusion of “green-consciousness” in urban politics, the eco-city has recently gained momentum. In the last decade, several governments from different areas of the world have approved plans for the construction of new master-planned urban developments aiming to find a balance with nature. The eco-city phenomenon is inscribed in a critical spatio-temporal context and its effects will arguably have a strong influence on our near future. Today, cities drain most of the global resources, have a major impact on the environment, and attract an increasing percentage of the world's population. Should the mainstream projections on 2050 prove to be correct, what we build now is and will be of primary importance. Hence, it is time to bring our current paradigms into question. This paper acknowledges the popularity that the eco-city has achieved in planning and mainstream discourses on sustainable development and aims to develop an understanding of the phenomenon on the basis of empirical analysis. More specifically, the paper focuses on the nexus between eco-cities and sustainability ideology to show how the latter is understood and applied in the development of new settlements. Using Masdar City as a case study, the three canonic dimensions of sustainability: the economic, the social, and the environmental, are here explored, and their respective weight evaluated. Ultimately, it will be shown how the foundations of the eco-city are strongly grounded in economic concerns and how the social and environmental aspects form only a layer aiming to hide the real nature of the phenomenon.

SUMMARY Starting from the 90s, the design of new districts having strong environmental and energy sustainable profiles has gained attention among public administrations and project teams. These co-operations have brought new lines of research oriented towards the definition of different energy strategies at the urban and local scales. This paper analyzes the importance of local polices to create sustainable districts: main European case-studies; The research has been conducted on main European ecological showcase models; Compact city, solar and wind design, mobility and car free development, environment, biodiversity, green and water infrastructures, role of the inhabitants (public participation processes) are the focus areas in which the districts can be allocated. Common aspect of the different projects is the compact city concept, which joins the nowadays debate around dense urban areas. Several conclusions can be drawn related with the sustainable design of new settlements. In general the high density and compact city concepts are applied in the entire analyzed projects, which recognize the positive effects related with the installation of DER systems, public transport, and public services in accordance with principles of effectiveness and efficiency. The compact city is linked with the increase of functional mix and that has positive effects on reducing energy demand peaks.

The paper aims to reveal one integrated global map which points out the major geographical inequalities in providing basic utilities across the countries using multivariate analysis and thematic cartography. Sixteen indicators with global coverage were selected taking into account the waste collection services, sanitation facilities, drinking water sources, energy, electricity, habitat and demographic conditions. Several data are broken down for the total, urban and rural population in order to outline the rural-urban disparities between and within countries. A special focus is given to waste collection coverage, in order to compute a comprehensive global assessment of this key indicator of public health, which is one of the poorest monitored basic utility. The world countries were divided into 10 classes according to the hierarchical cluster analysis. Each class has particular features outlining the gaps between high, middle and low-income countries with direct impact on quality of life, public health, and environment.

Governments and developers around the globe are exploiting the benefits of island spatiality to sell urban sustainability. Many new-build smart cities, eco-cities, and sustainable cities ('smart eco-cities') are constructed on small islands or otherwise bounded from surrounding urban space. Island spatiality presents benefits for selling smart eco-cities as role models of sustainable innovation: ease of creating value, ease of measuring sustainability, and ease of communicating success. These benefits, however, are all largely illusory, contributing primarily to the appearance of sustainability for the sake of economic profit. The great innovation of island smart-cities is frequently an innovation in the selling of sustainability. By monetising the environment through ecosystem services, incentivising largely symbolic 'green' projects and architecture, drawing attention away from unsustainable practices elsewhere, and exacerbating social inequality, island smart eco-cities may be making the world less sustainable. They may also be unreproducible by design and lead to a global devaluing of genuinely sustainable but non-iconic urban development. Island smart eco-cities increasingly serve as secessionary enclaves for a global elite, privileging corporate over public interests and spearheading an invidious argument of sustainable development by deregulation.

Para que un proyecto de ecociudad sea un objetivo ineludible, que tenga como meta la transformación global del fenómeno urbano, es preciso un enfoque riguroso de la sostenibilidad en el ámbito urbano que identifique todos los aspectos clave que configuran la realidad urbana y una formulación clara y detallada de los objetivos generales y particulares. Esta concepción de la ecociudad como meta viva, como conjunto de objetivos interdependientes y en continua retroalimentación, debería basarse en la evaluación colectiva de los resultados. Saber cartografiar este proceso es más importante que afanarse en aplicarle etiquetas mediáticas. Hoy, más que atender exclusivamente a los núcleos urbanos, resulta cada vez más relevante analizar los procesos que acaecen en el ámbito difuso y sin nombre que se extiende entre las ciudades consolidadas.

Background: This paper examines the hierarchy of technologies for a sustainable mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector in the City of Athens. The greenhouse gas inventory of the building stock of the city and its energy consumption is investigated, pinpointing to effective energy saving scenarios, in which available in the market technologies are examined for their efficiency, cost-effectiveness and sustainability. Methods: Criteria for selecting these technologies have derived from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. By using the Multi Attribute Utility Theory, these technologies are prioritised, taking into account the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, energy savings, the payback period of the embodied energy of the technologies used for the energy upgrade of buildings, their impact on the heat island effect, the initial cost of the investment and its payback period. Through the dynamic hypothesis on greenhouse gas emissions from electri...

Infrastructure threatens to lock-in societies to fossil fuels, unless something is done about it now. This is because infrastructure lasts for such a long-time, meaning that any infrastructure built or rebuilt now will last well into the 21st century – even until the end of the century in some cases. Consequently, there is a need to integrate climate change, especially adaptation, into infrastructure now or societies will be left with infrastructure designed around an unsustainable socio-technical system (e.g. combustion engines, roads, suburbanization, etc.). Such change is conceptualized in the literature as a sustainability transition. However, any attempts at such transitions have to address the materialities of infrastructure systems (e.g. physical form, environmental context, etc.). In this paper I develop the concept of socio-material systems and apply it to transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada.

Article discusses current problems in rural Serbia and investigates development opportunities. The intention is to indicate strengths and weaknesses of the present situation and to highlight possible solutions for sustainable development. The results were presented in the form of potential methods for future development and are dis-cussed through several issues: sustainable regional development and sustainable rural development as an alternative to excessive urbanization; cultivating the tradition of the village and development of rural tourism; cultural heritage in the service of sustainable development; building the ecological image of the village through promotion of the local economy and organic farming; and social capital and infrastructure development as factors of sustainable development. The conclusion is that in planning the development of rural areas, villages should be seen as a value and their potentials and regional characteristics should be promoted and used in order to contribute to sustainable development.

Key words: rural development, sustainability, localization, tourism, heritage, agriculture, tradition