Integrated Urban Planning: Directions, Resources and Territories

The purpose of the book on integrated urban planning (IUP) is to present ongoing research from the universities involved in the project Creating the Network of Knowledge Labs for Sustainable and Resilient Environments (KLABS). Although sustainability and resilience have been largely explored in many complex social-ecological systems, they have only recently been applied in the context of cities. Both concepts are useful when seeking an integrated approach to urban planning as they help to look at the city as an interconnected, multi-dimensional system. Analysing the sustainability and the resilience of urban systems involves looking at environmental, social and economic aspects, as well as at those related to technology, culture and institutional structures. Sustainability, resilience as well as integrated urban development are all focused on process. Their objectives are typically defined around the ongoing operation of the process and they can change during the time. Therefore, building a sustainable and resilient city is a collective endeavor that is about mindsets just as much as about physical structures and their operation, where capacity to anticipate and plan for the future, to learn and to adapt are paramount.The papers published in this book show that the recent and current research in those institutions focuses on the directions of development of IUP, the processes that support sustainable and resilient use of natural resources and their application in the Western Balkan and some other European countries. Each essay aims to provide an overview of key aspects of the research topic.The division of the book into three parts - directions, resources and territories - underlines how the challenges that the contemporary city poses can be dealt with more effectively by integrating different paradigms, concepts and trends of urban development and governance; taking into account the numerous problems linked to the availability and exploitation of the main natural and non-natural resources; and looking at the city and the territory as systems in constant transformation, not reducible within rigid dichotomies such as urban/rural, dense/sprawled, formal/informal, etc.