The world?s population reached more than 6.9 billion people in July 2011. It is expected that the population growth during the next 40 years will take place mostly in low-income countries and the population increase will be 2.3 billion people during 2011-2050. A rapid urbanization is also expected to result in 57.7 per cent of Africa?s population living in urban areas in 2050.

Outdoor recreation habits in metropolis and rural areasThis study aims to examine the perception of nature and outdoor recreation habits from an urban-rural prospective. The urbanization process continues in Sweden and the populations of the cities are growing continuously. Trends to build more compact and ?climate smart? reigns and with this a risk that green areas and areas where outdoor recreation can be practiced are situated further and further away from the urban population. Analyzing the responses from a survey made by the research program Friluftsliv i förändring 2007 we have examined if and which differences exists between urban and rural areas regarding their perception of nature, outdoor recreation habits and factors influencing the practice of outdoor recreation.

This master thesis explores the nature of public participation as a central and most current subject in the field of urban planning. A first impression exposes a seemingly unanalyzed consensus on the values and benefits which public participation provides the process of urban planning. The city may be a concern to all its inhabitants; hence knowledge and opinions of the local public are of great importance for the Urban Development. But is there really something new to these assumptions, and are the advantages of increased public participation in urban planning always obvious?  By using action research as a main method, I have put myself into the context of the Swedish municipality of Nacka and their projects dealing with the development of public participation.

The effect of climate change places demands on how we build cities. Cities have to be built denser to meet the objectives of sustainability but as a result of this densification city green areas are at risk of exploitationand disappearing. The question this raises is whether there has to be an opposition between a dense and a green city?Urban trees are playing a very important role in cities. They stand as the major part of the vegetation in citieswhich are otherwise dominated with concrete and stone.

The title Urban furniture for young people reveals that this paper handles two central phenomenon in landscape architecture; the form and content of the urban spaces, respectively the users and their need for an appropriate outdoor environment in the city. In this paper youth is referred to as 15-18 year olds and the paper is based on theories of their physical use of the city?s outdoor environment. Urban furniture refers to equipment and components in the public room which becomes furniture when people takes them in to claim and gives them a meaning and a function that is useful for the moment. The starting point is that the users, in this case youths, defi nes urban furniture as something signifi cantly more than traditional park furniture, bicycle racks and waste baskets. This paper aims to investigate how the city?s furniture can be developed to meet the youths need to see each other, move and make their marks in the public room. The theories about how youths uses the city are presented in the Theory chapter.

This paper is about the facades and the streets impact on theexperience of the city and how architects can create cities forthe human kind with simple tools that makes a hugh difference forthe experience of urban space.As the cities are growing in a faster rate and as more people moveto the cities, they will also affect more people. The differentstructures that can be found in the cities therefore gets moreimportant and giving design to city structures also gets morecomplex because of our higher demands on urban functions andcontent. It?s difficult to evaluate the ultimate city structuresince all people experience their city in different ways, butarchitects still should be able to create urban spaces thatis suited for the human kind, just as we can create differentbiotopes for flora and fauna. Therefore there must be generalideas of what the human being experience as good or bad and theseshould be guidelines when designing urban space.Since urban space is something that most people experience everyday it doesn´t always have a clear impact on them.

Title: The process of gentrification ?the transformation of declined neighbourhoods into attractive ones Gentrification = ?A social process of change where people with high socioeconomic status move into neighbourhoods which traditionally has been dominated by people from the lower classes or from ethnical minorities.? (Nationalencyklopedin 2010).In many cities around the world, disinvested neighbourhoods become the place to be, where everything happens. This usually occurs when different social groups, such as bohemians, homosexuals and artists, move into a declined and disinvested neighbourhood. After a while, people from the middleclass move in to the area due to its increased attractiveness, and start to renovate their properties. This usually leads to higher rents, which force some of the original inhabitants to leave the neighbourhood.

The use of energy is an important question in today´s society, and a substantial part of the energy that is used today is used in our homes. To lower this usage is vital, and there are regulations in place both on the national and the local level, that say that new apartment blocks must be built to consume less energy, which in the end will lower the impact on the climate.One way to make the housing sector more environmentally sustainable, is to produce energy issions that are bad for the environment, for example to build wind turbines close to or even on the buildings, so called urban wind power. The scope for this report is to see if urban wind power could be a sustainable alternative for the residential area that Svenska Bostäder plans to build in Albano in Stockholm.There are extensive scientific theories regarding wind and wind power, and a literature study is made to investigate past knowledge in the area. Efforts have been made to find earlier trials with urban wind power and, both scientific research and trials where urban wind power actually has been installed. The theory chapter deals both with the wind itself and how electricity can be generated from wind.

Urban forests are important for people to get at break and be able to relax in a stressful world. Several studies show that we feel better through being out in the forest and historically this was the normal environment for us. As a result of population growth and urbanization we tend to spend less time in nature nowadays than before. Due to this development urban forests have become a central role in our society as a place where people can fulfill their needs and interests. The management of the urban forest is therefore important, especially for municipalities that own forest which is supposed to be of benefit to local residents.Falköpings municipality owns approximately 260 hectares of forest in the popular and most visited recreational area along Mösseberg?s southern slope.

More than fifty percent of the world population today lives in cities, and the pressures of urbanisation are particularly present in developing countries. As landscape architects, it is important to gain knowledge about the effect of urbanisation and ways to prevent the negativities. Experiencing the effects in person in a developing country, as well as learning from and about other cultures, enhances the understanding for global situations. Dar es Salaam is located in one of the most rapidly urbanising regions in the world, which puts pressure on the environment and the humans living in it. Lack of means to regulate land development has led to a situation where expansion of unplanned settlements occurs, with spatial disorder as a consequence. This has in the extension led to a decreasing amount of publicly available and qualitative green spaces, and degradation of the few ones that exist. There are facts that strengthen the status of urban parks, which especially becomes relevant in developing countries where many people live in sparse and exposed conditions.

This report is written in cooperation with Eskilstuna municipality public administration for urban planning. The reports purpose is to look into how other public authorities carry out public purchase of consultants and entrepreneurs in the urban planning area. The goal is to come up with suggestions of how Eskilstuna municipality public administration for urban planning can improve its purchasing process in this field in order to minimize the risk where a consultant or entrepreneur files an appeal against the decision of awarding a contract to another rival. The appeal can be filed to the county administrative court.The public administration for urban planning can do its purchases through the model of "lowest price" or "economically most favorable" for them. When using "economically most favorable", the department can value a number of soft parameters by giving them points and the offer which gets most points can be rewarded the right to sign a contract.

Studies have shown that air pollution, as well as bark fissure depth and sun exposure of a tree can have an effect on lichen growth as well as abundance of lichen species. The aim of this study was to find out the relative importance of these factors. 211 oaks in south eastern Sweden were surveyed for presence of 17 lichen species, as well as the total number of lichen species. Half of the trees were situated in urban areas and half in the countryside. For each tree the bark fissure depth was measured and the sun exposure of the trunk was estimated.

Densification is one of the urban visions for sustainable development - a vision that has become a part of the solution to the unsustainable sake dilemma. With the dense city land will be saved, energy consumption reduced and social cohesion improved. The dense city is considered to be ecologically, economically and socially sustainable. Applying an urban design concept has thus proven to be problematic. Density has been found to be a complex concept which is far more complicated than measuring how much built surface that needs to be covered. It is also not disputed what different degrees of densification mean and whether densification in itself is sustainable.

In Sweden, the main responsibility for urban planning lies with the municipalities. The county administrative boards are responsible for clarifying the governmental interests for the municipalities. The main purpose of this essay was to study documents with descriptions of national heritage areas in order to examine whether certain problems within these documents are still present in the most recent ones. This was done by comparing old documents with new ones. The problem with these kinds of documents has been the lack of clarification of cultural values in national heritage areas.

The present study examines the demolition of a house on Hammarkulletorget in 1996 and the discourse of Hammarkullen, Gothenburg(Sweden), drawn from the perspective of historicization [?historisering?]. I have examined how the past played role inpresentations of Hammarkullen and how the past affected the decision to demolish a house. By examining which role the neighbourhood?spast time played in the perception of the neighbourhood, the thesis aims at providing a better understanding of howthe past can influence and legitimize major changes in the urban environment.In the early 1980s the image of Hammarkullen as a victim of negative publicity is established and this reputation lives beyond thesimplistic and negative descriptions themselfs.