This handbook aims to increase attention to small and medium sized cities and explore the unique challenges they face, as well as provide practical recommendations for built environment practitioners to understand and respond to these challenges in global contexts.
Small and medium-sized cities (SMCs) are becoming the new frontiers of global urban growth and population change. Yet, they are overlooked in the policy and scholarship discourses about urban futures, particularly urban planning for resilient futures. This handbook aims to increase attention to the resilience of SMCs and explore the unique challenges they face, as well as provide practical recommendations for built environment practitioners to understand and respond to these challenges in global contexts. Chapters cover a range of important topics on the different dimensions of urban resilience such as climate-induced risks, heat resilience planning, access to urban infrastructure and services, socio-environmental inequities, urban safety, health resilience, walkability, and more. Contributors discuss ways to enhance policy and planning efforts to address these challenges and advocate for the need to pay attention to SMCs when promoting urban resilience to avert the risks often manifested in large cities. This handbook transcends disciplinary boundaries and expertise, bringing together a diverse range of contributions from scholars and practitioners in over fifteen countries across Africa, Asia, North and South America, Europe, and Oceania to counter the apparent paucity of attention on SMCs in the global resilience agenda.This handbook is essential for scholars and practitioners working in the built environment, such as city and regional planning, public policy, public health, environmental science, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, spatial planning, and geography.
Introduction: Valorizing the resilience of small and medium-sized cities
PART ONE: GROUNDING URBAN RESILIENCE IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED CITIES
1. A
Review of Resilience Research of Small and Medium-Sized Cities in Global
North Countries
2. Framing the Resilience Research Agenda of Small and
Medium-Sized Cities in Global South Countries: A Review
3. Climate and
Environmental Risks and Resilience in Small and Medium-sized Cities in Africa
4. Pathways for Resilience to Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights
from Bamenda, Cameroon
5. Climate change awareness and adaptive practices
among riverbank communities along the Ogun River, Nigeria: Implications for
climate resilience
6. Walkability in Medium-sized Brazilian Cities: A Scoping
Review
7. Linking urban insecurity, private shuttle service adoption and
resilience in South African cities
8. The Non-linear Spatial Grid of Urban
Villages in Small and Medium-sized Towns: Implications for Urban Resilience
in India
9. The Khon Kaen Model: Balancing Growth and Resilience?
10. The
Economic Transformation of Ezulwini Town: A Case Study in Strategic
Investment and Development
11. Urbanisation and Socio-Economic Vulnerability:
Comparative Pathways for Urban Resilience in sub-Saharan Africa
12.
Contextualizing Resilient Planning in Khulna, Bangladesh PART TWO: PLANNING
FOR RESILIENCE IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED CITIES
13. The Power of Planning:
Mitigating diverse external threats among Small and Medium-sized Cities
(SMCs) through the Texas Target Communities Program
14. Secondary Cities at
the Interface of Disaster Risk Reduction: Assessing Institutional Readiness
in Undersieged Towns
15. Fire Outbreaks, Disaster Resilience and the Right to
the City: The Case of Informal Settlements in Namibia
16. The COVID-19
Pandemic, Urban Food Value Chains and Resilience Planning in Small and
Medium-sized Cities of Namibia
17. Environmental resilience planning in
overlooked small towns: Examining temporalities and structural challenges in
access to water and sanitation in Yilo Krobo municipality, Ghana.
18.
Mainstreaming heat resilience in local development plans of small and
medium-sized urbanizing jurisdictions: A focus on semi-arid Ghana
19.
Stocktaking Nature-based Solutions in Africa: Implications for Equitable
Resilience in Small and medium-sized Cities
20. Addressing Extreme Heat in US
Cities via Nature-based solutions: A Mapping Approach to Identifying Places
for Action in Memphis, TN
21. Re-envisioning the Metro Urban-Rural Linkages
as a Complex Adaptive System Encompassing Anti-fragility for Building
Resilience in Small and Medium-Sized Cities PART THREE: INNOVATIONS AND
PRACTICES FOR BUILDING RESILIENCE IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED CITIES
22.
Bottom-up Governance for Resilient Urban Futures? Intersections and Tensions
from Mahikeng, South Africa
23. Transforming Altenburg: The rise of
right-wing populism and the restoration of local trust
24. Public Health
Adaptation to Extreme Heat in Small and Medium-sized Cities
25. Urban
farm-based businesses for circular waste management: Exploring Food Waste
Circuits in Masaka, Uganda
26. Strategies for Sustainable Urban Renewal of
Small and Medium-Sized Cities: The Canadian Experience
27. Indigenous
Innovation for Managing Environmental Risk in Nigerian Small and Medium-Sized
Cities
28. Governing Municipalities: Steering the Resilient Futures of Small
and Medium-Sized Cities
29. In the Age of Skepticism: Building Partnerships
with Nonprofits to Strengthen Resilience in SMCs
30. Revisiting Urban
Resilience within the New Urban Agenda: The Role of informal urban
agriculture in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe Conclusion
Seth Asare Okyere is a visiting lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh and an adjunct associate professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University.
Stephen K. Diko is an Assistant Professor at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis.
Louis Kusi Frimpong is a lecturer at the Department of Geography and Earth Science, University of Environment and Sustainable Development, Ghana.
Matthew Abunyewah is a research-focused lecturer at the Faculty of Health, Charles Darwin University, and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Stephen Leonard Mensah is a doctoral researcher and critical urban research fellow at the University of Memphis.
