دانلود کتاب SDG 11 ، شهرها و جوامع پایدار – پیشروی با اقتصاد دایره ای

As national economies and populations become concentrated around cities, urban areas are attracting extensive attention. Contemporary challenges, such as environmental degradation, climate change, economic crises and social inequi­ties, are urgently calling for cities to change their business-as-usual approaches and transform themselves into being more efficient, sustainable, inclusive and resilient urban systems. The possible pathways for such a transition are the focus of the 11th Sustainable Development Goal or SDG 11 and this book.

The authors of this book come from a variety of disciplines, and the book is thus enriched by insights from multiple disciplinary perspectives covering social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. Presentation of their work in the form of detailed case studies will permit readers to understand the processes of transition to SDG 11 with concrete illustrations of drivers and obstructers along the way. Finally, as the volume covers both developed and developing countries, it provides an opportunity to understand the challenges to SDG 11 attainment under diverse national systems and development contexts.

How did so many different authors from various continents of the world come together to write this book? Well, this had everything to do with the passion of Ms. Maria Tomai, now a doctoral student at UNU-MERIT! In 2018, she had just finished her master’s degree in economics at Maastricht University on a comparative study of solid waste management systems in Maastricht and Ath­ens. She was a research intern at SITE4Society, an initiative that Prof. Shyama Ramani (lead editor of this book) had created in Maastricht to strengthen syn­ergies between the scientific and the practitioner communities. A small team, including Ms. Tomai, Dr. Sanae Okamoto and Prof. Ramani, organised their first international conference on ‘Urban Sustainability and Catching up to a Circu­lar Economy’ in June 2018. There, the team met Prof. Hiroshan Hettiarachchi (co-editor of this book), who was from UNU-FLORES in Germany via Dr. Raja Venkataramani in India! At the time, little had any of us imagined that this growing team would be coordinating and submitting a book volume together, three years onwards.

Then again, pushed by Ms. Tomai’s passion for the subject, we applied and won a grant from the Worldwide Universities Network or WUN to create a research collaboration between four universities: Maastricht University, Uni­versity of Ghana, University College Dublin and the University of York on the topic of urban solid waste management. We decided that in order to understand the complex problem of solid waste management in developing countries, rather than only listening to research findings in a room, we would learn through direct observations. So we all set off to meet together in Accra!

Our Accra site visits provided us with deep learning. For instance, our visit to Agbogbloshie, a huge e-waste and resource recovery site, organised extremely well while being largely an informal settlement, challenged our perceptions about what the circular economy could look like. From big cooking pots, made out of different aluminum parts (through sand casting) and dainty bracelets from metals extracted from electronics to repaired laptops and TVs, this park raised question after question: how could a site like Agbogbloshie develop economi­cally while minimising all the grave threats to human health and environment? And how could it be achieved while championing inclusiveness and equality?

Dr. Kelly Redeker (University of York) rightly remarked: ‘Each waste stream exists within a larger socio-political and environmental context and therefore any intervention must be carefully applied in line with the specific context of the community in question’ – triggering the arguments and propositions of the day! From another angle, a wake-up call was sounded by Prof. Nick Holden (Univer­sity College Dublin), who disputed the conventional concept of waste hierarchy (reduce-reuse-recycle-recover-dispose), arguing instead that waste prevention should be focused upon from the start. In the same spirit, Dr. Tom Curran (Uni­versity College Dublin) presented a holistic approach to the Circular Economy, through Agrocycle, a project involving innovative products, trading and educa­tion in the agri-food sector. Prof. Hettiarachchi (UNU-FLORES) mused: ‘Suc­cess stories often have policy backing prior to or during the implementation. But it does not have to be a pre-condition, if we use innovative thinking’. To cut a long story short, by the end of the day, we had decided that we would also become innovators ourselves, albeit in a very modest way! This book is the result.