Urban Sustainability And River Restoration - Greenand Blue Infrastructure

Green and blue infrastructure (GBI) contributes to the enhancement of quality of life and sustainable development in cities, providing recreational spaces and access to the water. This book investigates and integrates several disciplinary contributions to provide an analytical outline useful for urban planners, architects and engineers, non-profit and community associations, legislators and policy makers alike. Policies and regulations regarding environmental sustainability represent a key focus of the book, along with technical implementation aspects.

The first part of Urban Sustainability and River Restoration presents an overview of the main ecological and environmental problems affecting urban areas due to a combination of anthropic activities and climate change effects outlining the related mitigation and adaptation strategies based on GBI implementation and river restoration The second part analyses the techniques to integrate these mitigation and adaptation strategies in the urban context. The third part of the book defines top-dawn and bottom-up policies, developed in the United States and in Europe. Six river restoration case studies are considered, focusing on the different policies and governance strategies - at a federal, national, administrative and local scale - adopted to restore neglected places and trigger brownfield regeneration.

Katia Perini is adjunct professor and postdoctoral research fellow at the Scuola Politecnica - Universita degli Studi di Genova, Department of Architectural Sciences. Her research focuses on environmental sustainability and on integration of vegetation as means to restore the environmental quality of urban areas. She has been a guest researcher at the Delft University of Technology (CITG, Department of Materials & Environment). She was selected as a Fulbright grantee, under the Fulbright-Schuman Program, with a research project regarding the sustainability of urban areas with New York City as case study; the research was conducted at the Urban Design Lab of the Earth Institute of Columbia University (NY, USA).
Paola Sabbion is landscape architect and adjunct professor at the University of Genoa, Polytechnic School, Department of Sciences for Architecture. She has researched degraded landscapes and was winner of a Research Fellowship at UrbanLab, Municipality of Genoa Urban Planning Office, with the advisory of Richard Burdett, London School of Economics. Paola works as tutor at different international workshops to the students of the Master's degree in Landscape Architecture (i e , Workshop: "Grossraschen Lake District", Cottbus (Germany), in collaboration with IBA - Internationale Bauausstellung, and Workshop: "Mies van der Rohe: Mediterranean Cities", in collaboration with UNIGE and UPC Barcelona). In 2012 Paola was the winner of a PhD grant based on funds from MIUR (Ministero Istruzione Universita Ricerca) by the Italian government.