Seth Asare Okyere – författare

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.

Planning for Resilient Small and Medium-Sized Cities in Ghana explores the resilience and planning dynamics and complexities of rapid urban transitions in Ghana’s small and medium-sized cities (SMCs) and their implications for Africa and the Global South.The book argues that Ghana’s urban future may have more to do with the steady growth of SMCs, where urban consolidation is gradually taking a foothold. Recognizing that Ghana’s primary cities are well known to be socio-ecological hotspots of risk, reactive urban planning, and entrenched inequalities of alarming proportions, this book asks: would SMCs follow these troubling realities and trajectories in large cities or leapfrog to resilient futures that work for all? Through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributions emphasize the need for integrated planning strategies to navigate socio-ecological challenges and opportunities that SMCs face in terms of infrastructure, governance, and climate resilience.By centering overlooked and understudied SMCs in Ghana’s urban scholarship, this book realigns resilience planning to the spaces and places emerging as the frontiers of socio-ecological crises. It will be of interest to students and researchers of city and regional planning, urban studies, geography, environmental studies and science, public policy, development studies, and public health, as well as urban planners, community development practitioners, geographers, environmental, disaster, and resilient personnel, and policymakers.

This book takes a theoretical and empirical distance from urban slums/low-income settlements as a threat to environmental sustainability and recast them as places where environmentally rehabilitative and circular practices occur—drawing on the theoretical lens of the circular economy (CE). CE is defined as regenerative system that minimizes waste, emission, and energy leakage by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. In principle, CE departs from the traditional linear model of take-make-use-dispose. As conceived in urban contexts, circular cities offer possibilities to regenerate natural systems, design out waste, and keep products in use. While the CE key principles of reduce, repair, and reuse are essential to the sustainable and inclusive interventions in urban slums, there is lack of case studies exploring the role of place and agency, especially the slum living-CE nexus in global south contexts. In inequitable urban transitions, a nuanced understanding of thesynergies between urban slums and the circular economy is not only theoretically relevant for reconceptualizing the slum in urban sustainability discourses but also exert policy and practice ramifications to decidedly figure out how the urban slum phenomenon can foster the sustainable and inclusive development of marginal areas through contextual and people-centered initiatives.