The large spreading of e-democracy and e-participatory tools and environments showed, and is still showing, that technologies offer new direction for dealing with the challenge of scaling the deliberative democracy perspective up to the urban governance scale [10] [20]. The recent growth of ULLs and Human Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-scale of decisio...

Climate change is likely to exert escalating stresses on urban environments over the coming decades (Garnaut, 2008; IPCC, 2007; Stern, 2006). Urban settlements in Australia will be subject to significant vulnerability (Hennessy et al, 2007). This will prompt responses from institutional governance frameworks in Australian cities and metropolitan areas. Efforts to manage climate change effects i...

Introduction Continued urban sprawl combined with slowed-down or failed attempts of local government reform has resulted in a growing divergence between functional and institutional urban spaces in most industrialised countries. Today, cities in the (weberian) sense of territorially integrated socioeconomic entities no longer exist. The urban phenomenon is better described by the notion of metr...

Over recent decades, urban conservation has become an important strategy to improve urban competitiveness in the global economy. Insufficient attention has been paid to how urban conservation is governed and funded. Drawing on Lijiang Ancient Town, a Chinese World Heritage city, this study examines the power structure and funding systems of urban conservation, how social groups negotiate with t...

This study aimed to further our understanding of a characteristic of Community Resilience known as Disaster Governance. Three attributes of Disaster Governance-redundancy, diversity, and overlap-were studied in four coastal towns in southern Chile that are at risk of tsunamis. Overall, we explored how different spatial structures of human settlements influence Disaster Governance. Using the Pro...

This article shares experience on aspects related to the methodology and modeling of a framework of City E-Governance Readiness. We discuss Europe’s progress in this domain using an “e-readiness” assessment methodology: the Integrated City E-Governance Policy Model of the IntelCities Research Project (2004-2007). Practices and trends in 12 European cities are analyzed, drawing on the results of...