Suchergebnisse

The aim of this paper is to discuss how medium-sized cities can network effectively in order to attract population and activities in a globalizing society where urban regions keep growing often within the pattern of urban sprawl and where national governments keep sector planning still dominant over comprehensive regional planning. The case study introduces three towns (Vila Real/Régua/Lamego) located a hundred km east of the Metropolitan Area of Oporto and along the main national interior road, a connecting north-south axis. This hilly area is not sustaining its population, despite a regional plan approved in 1991 that for the first time assumed the need to develop these three towns as a major anchor in the interior northern Portugal. More than ten years past, two of these towns keep losing population to the coastal strip while the remaining other (Vila Real) has started to attract population. With significant different economic basis, split by physical constraints and historical sub-regional divides what appeared to planners to be the ideal solution and was appraised by politicians is taking a long time to develop. Infrastructure development has been lagging behind due to the high costs of building a motor way in a topographically constrained territory and in costly land as it is Port wine production area, part of it classified recently as World Heritage Area. This has probably been a major factor in hindering the interconnectivity of these three towns. In fact, what could be a 15 minutes safe trip is still taking almost one hour in ice-slippery winding roads. But other factors can be reported, namely initial lack of access to a national program with European Community funds targeting medium-sized towns for the two depressed towns. These factors among others will be put forward and discussed for further insight of the problems faced by medium-sized cities and especially their time lengthy process of reversing trends of losing population to urban ...

Estudos anteriores em domínios interdisciplinares (Sousa e Lourenço, 2006, 2009) apontam para a necessidade de uma abordagem linguística no estudo de planos urbanísticos, problematizando a dimensão da discussão pública implícita na sua redação legislativa, bem como o impacto no enunciatário no plano discursivo (Maingueneau, 1990, 1997). O estudo presente pretende explicitar o recurso a marcos conceituais (chaves de sentido) visando a eficácia social da norma urbanística a partir do critério da legitimidade. Esse critério estará tão mais percetível quanto mais cada cidadão participar da construção da ordem simbólica da lei e da linguagem (Cavallazzi et al., ...

This paper identifies the main references, authors and journals influencing the sustainable development literature. The task is accomplished by means of a citation analysis based on the records of ISI Web of Science. We found that the core of sustainability thinking is framed by a pattern of landmark studies published around every 5 years. Only 380 publications have been cited at least ten times. References with the highest influence are those with a global dimension and large diffusion, such as Brundtland Commission's ''Our common future'' (1987) and classics such as Meadows' et al. ''Limits to growth'' (1972). The list of the most influential references over the period 1960–2005 is dominated by contributions from economics (particularly ecological economics) and environmental science, but includes many other disciplines such as urban planning, political sciences and sociology. References are also made to policy documents such as ''Agenda 21'', one of the main outcomes of the Rio Summit in 1992. In analyzing citation trends, we found that 'classics', because of their high rates of citations per year, seem to have a more enduring and stable influence. ; This paper was written as part of a PhD research. The authors would like to credit the financial support provided by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (the Portuguese research foundation) under scholarship SFRH/BD/18588/2004 and project ...

Infrastructure systems are at the core of urban sustainability issues. As population growth in urban centres continues to increase, infrastructure requires both development and rehabilitation. Unsurprisingly, this challenge is more evident in urban centres across the world and Portugal is not exception. To address this issue, the technical proposal of the Portuguese Program of the Policies for Land-Use Planning (PNPOT), and according to the Council of Ministers Resolution of April 27, 2006, considers that in order for Portugal to become an equitable territory in terms of development and well-being, the territorial model and corresponding policies-program should encompass strategic options that amongst other things, define the urban system as the guiding criterion for infrastructure network and public facilities design. The European Council released the Renewed EU Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS) in June 2006, calling for sustainability research efforts that promote and are carried out via inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, with the purpose of bridging the gap between science, policy-making and implementation. As spatial distribution and structure of human activities change, so does the call for increased urbanization and associated negative environmental impacts. Therefore and predictably, a major challenge is the development of practical tools to measure and enhance urban sustainability, particularly those that concern design and management of sustainable infrastructure. Life-cycle and threshold analysis are potentially applicable tools. However, measuring the sustainable development level of a given region remains the result of a careful process of selecting and defining sustainability indicators/criteria. Though several have been proposed for a plethora of case studies, the fact remains that each case requires a specific set of indicators/criteria. Some of these indicators will be presented and explored in the paper presented herein for a case-study area of Portugal, the sub-region of ...

Published online 15 June 2009 in Wiley Online Library. ; This paper describes the global political milestones of greater importance to the emergence and evolution of sustainable development. In addition, it depicts the cyclical patterns of political activity dealing with sustainability and identifi es the main sustainability goals and targets endorsed by several political initiatives. These tasks are accomplished through a literature review and an assessment of indicators dealing with political will. It is concluded that global sustainability governance followed an intermittent path characterized by two periods of signifi cant accomplishments (until 1979; 1987–1995) and by two others less suc- cessful (1980–1986; 1995 onwards, interrupted by a peak around 2000). Peaks in political activity coincide with the decennial Earth Summits, suggesting their major infl uence as catalysts of more profound societal and political action. Sustainability concerns and goals shifted from an emphasis on pollution control and availability of natural resources to a more balanced position that puts human development at the ...

Naturbanization analyses territorial changes in the surroundings of national parks brought about by the arrival of new settlers and economic activities, both of which are attracted by the value of the environment and landscape. This paper presents a comparison of the naturbanization processes in three national parks in Spain and Portugal (Doñana and Sierra Nevada National Parks, and Peneda-Gêres National Park, respectively) and in their areas of influence. Data is taken from Corine-Land Cover (1990-2006), which is the only available source of information about land use and land cover changes in the whole of the European Union. These changes have been interpreted and analysed using the Cross Tabulation Matrix developed by Pontius (2004). Land use changes connected to naturbanization processes are measured using Gains and Loss measurements. The intensification of changes in land use is one of the most significant developments associated with these processes, which have implications for the sustainable development and conservation of these ...

Using green façades in large cities with hot climates has been introduced in the search for more sustainable solutions for urban development. This paper presents the data collected in situ and quantifies the thermal external behaviour of a green wall and a bare one in the same surrounding environment in the city centre of Madrid, Spain. The methodological approach helps to assess the impacts of both walls on the variation of the urban temperature range at the microclimate scale in accordance with environmental physical data at different seasons and times of the day. In the summer campaign, the maximum values of air temperature reduction as measured in situ range between 2.5 °C and 2.9 °C which confirmed the values of various other studies using similar measurements. In the autumn campaign, the maximum values were half of the ones obtained for the summer, not exceeding 1.5 °C. However, these values increased after calculating similar conditions of sunlight in both façades. This comparative analysis of the experimental results on a green wall and a bare wall demonstrates that green façades can have a significant temperature reduction potential in the surrounding microclimate. ; The authors are grateful to the European Union Erasmusþ Program for funding the Portuguese researchers' trips and visits to ...