Jennifer Kent – författare

Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments shines a quintessentially Australian light on the links between land use planning and human health. A burgeoning body of empirical research demonstrates the ways urban structure and governance influences human health—and Australia is playing a pivotal role in developing understandings of the relationships between health and the built environment.

This book takes a retrospective look at many of the challenges faced in pushing the healthy built environment agenda forward. It provides a clear and theoretically sound framework to inform this work into the future. With an emphasis on context and the pursuit of equity, Jennifer L. Kent and Susan Thompson supply specific ways to better incorporate idiosyncrasies of place and culture into urban planning interventions for health promotion.

By chronicling the ways health and the built environment scholarship and practice can work together, Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments enters into new theoretical and practical debates in this critically important area of research. This book will resonate with both health and built environment scholars and practitioners working to create sustainable and health-supportive urban environments.

Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments shines a quintessentially Australian light on the links between land use planning and human health. A burgeoning body of empirical research demonstrates the ways urban structure and governance influences human health—and Australia is playing a pivotal role in developing understandings of the relationships between health and the built environment.

This book takes a retrospective look at many of the challenges faced in pushing the healthy built environment agenda forward. It provides a clear and theoretically sound framework to inform this work into the future. With an emphasis on context and the pursuit of equity, Jennifer L. Kent and Susan Thompson supply specific ways to better incorporate idiosyncrasies of place and culture into urban planning interventions for health promotion.

By chronicling the ways health and the built environment scholarship and practice can work together, Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments enters into new theoretical and practical debates in this critically important area of research. This book will resonate with both health and built environment scholars and practitioners working to create sustainable and health-supportive urban environments.

The failure of recent international negotiations to progress global action on climate change has shifted attention to the emergence of grassroots sustainability initiatives. These civil society networks display the potential to implement social innovation and change processes from the ‘bottom up’. Recent scholarship has sought to theorise grassroots community-based low carbon practices in terms of their sustainability transition potential. However there are few empirical examples that demonstrate the factors for success of community-based social innovations in achieving more widespread adoption outside of their local, sustainability ‘niche’.

The book seeks to address two significant gaps related to grassroots climate action: firstly the continuing dominance of the individualisation of responsibility for climate change action which presupposes that individuals hold both the ability and desire to shift their behaviours and lifestyle choices to align with a low carbon future. Secondly, the potential for community-based collectives to influence mainstream climate change governance, an area significantly under researched. Drawing on empirical research into Australian Climate Action Groups (CAGs) and related international research, the book argues that grassroots community-based collective action on climate change holds the key to broader social change.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, citizen participation, environmental sociology and sustainable development.