Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Earth & environment > The environment > General
The struggle for the right to housing is a battle over property rights and land use. For housing to be provided as a human need, land must be recognised as a common right. Property, Planning and Protest is a compelling new investigation into public opposition to housing and real estate development. Its innovative materialist approach is grounded in the political economy of land value and it recognises conflict between communities and real estate capital as a struggle over land and property rights. Property, Planning and Protest is about a social movement struggling for democratic representation in land use decisions. The amenity groups it describes champion a democratic plan-led system that allocates land for social and environmental goals. Situating this movement in a history of land reform and common rights, this book sets out a persuasive new vision of democratic planning and contributes a powerful insight into the global affordability crisis in housing.
This book addresses the use of Benedict Spinoza's philosophy in current attempts to elaborate an ecological basis for international environmental law. Because the question of environmental protection has not been satisfactory resolved, the legal debate concerning our responsibility for the environment has - as evidenced in the recent UN report series Harmony with Nature - come to invite calls for a new eco-centric, rather than anthropocentric, legal paradigm. In this respect, Spinoza appears as a key figure. He is one of the few philosophers in the history of western philosophy who cares, and writes extensively, about the roots of anthropocentrism; the core issue of contemporary normative debates in ecology. And in response to the rapidly developing ecological crisis, his work has become central to a re-thinking of the human relationship with nature. Addressing the contention that Spinoza's ethics might provide a useful source for developing a new, eco-centred framework for environmental law, this book elaborates a more nuanced understanding of Spinoza's philosophy. Spinoza cannot, it is argued here, simply be reduced to an eco-ethicist. That is: his metaphysics cannot be used as basis of an essentially naturalised or extended human morality. At the same time, however, this book argues that the radicality of Spinoza's naturalism nevertheless offers the possibility of developing a more adequate ecological basis for environmental law.
Biophilic Connections and Environmental Encounters in the Urban Age takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on the authors' wide range of experience, to provide a greater understanding of the different dimensions of environmental engagement. It considers the ways that we interact with our environments, presenting a comprehensive account of how people negotiate and use the urban landscape. Set within current debates concerning urban futures, societal issues, sustainable cities, health and well-being, the book explores our innate need for contact with the natural world through biophilic design thinking to expand our knowledge base and promote a wider understanding of the importance of these interactions on our collective well-being. It responds to questions such as, what are the urban qualities that support our well-being? As an urbanised society what are the environmental determinants that promote healthy and satisfying lifestyles? Beginning with an overview of concepts relating to biophilia and environmental engagement, it moves through current theory and practice, different pathways and their characteristics, before presenting real world examples and applications through illustrated case studies in the UK, USA and across Europe. With a particular focus on the experience of individuals, the book is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, design and health sciences, interested in the future of our cities and the importance of green spaces.
This book is a practitioner's guide to sustainable development, laying out strategies for attracting investment for communities and their partners. It proposes an innovative Sustainable Development Proposition (SDP) decision-making tool based on a propositional calculus that can be used to analyse the sustainability of an infrastructure investment. It draws on environmental sustainability governance data analysis enabling investors to understand the economic indicators, income potential, return on investment, demand and legal compliance, as well as community and social benefits. Identified risks, issues and advantages are managed and monitored, and the SDP guidance can be applied to improve the prospects of the project in order to attract investment. Sustainable Community Investment Indicators (SCIIs (TM)) have been developed to assist with attracting investment and monitoring feedback on infrastructure projects, designed by the author for remote rural and indigenous communities - in response to current industry tools that are designed for urban environments. The book includes a broad range of real-world and hypothetical case studies in agricultural and indigenous areas in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. Taking a diverse economies approach, these industry tools can be adapted to allow for enterprise design with unique communities. This book provides sustainable development practitioners, including government agencies, financiers, developers, lawyers and engineers, with a positive, practical guide to addressing and overcoming global issues with local and community-based solutions and funding options.
Gentrification is a global process that the United Nations now sees as a human rights issue. This new Planetary Gentrification Reader follows on from the editors' 2010 volume, The Gentrification Reader, and provides a more longitudinal (backward and forward in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo-/Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrification studies over time and space, drawing on key readings that reflect the development of cutting-edge debates. Revisiting new debates over the histories of gentrification, thinking through comparative urbanism on gentrification, considering new waves and types of gentrification, and giving much more focus to resistance to gentrification, this is a stellar collection of writings on this critical issue. Like in their 2010 Reader, the editors, who are internationally renowned experts in the field, include insightful commentary and suggested further reading. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in urban studies, urban planning, human geography, sociology, and housing studies and for those seeking to fight this socially unjust process.
India in Art in Ireland is the first book to address how the relationship between these two ends of the British Empire played out in the visual arts. It demonstrates that Irish ambivalence about British imperialism in India complicates the assumption that colonialism precluded identifying with an exotic other. Examining a wide range of media, including manuscript illuminations, paintings, prints, architecture, stained glass, and photography, its authors demonstrate the complex nature of empire in India, compare these empires to British imperialism in Ireland, and explore the contemporary relationship between what are now two independent countries through a consideration of works of art in Irish collections, supplemented by a consideration of Irish architecture and of contemporary Irish visual culture. The collection features essays on Rajput and Mughal miniatures, on a portrait of an Indian woman by the Irish painter Thomas Hickey, on the gate lodge to the Dromana estate in County Waterford, and a consideration of the intellectual context of Harry Clarke's Eve of St. Agnes window. This book should appeal not only to those seeking to learn more about some of Ireland's most cherished works of art, but to all those curious about the complex interplay between empire, anti-colonialism, and the visual arts.
Under fire conditions, the strong interactions in structures result in different load carrying mechanisms and drastic redistributions of internal forces in structural members, which are concentrated at and transferred via connections. Fire safety depends on the performance of these connections, including their temperature distribution and load-carrying mechanisms, and good performance ensures structural robustness in fire. Behaviour and Design of Steel and Composite Connections in Fire is the only dedicated book on fire performance of connections in steel and composite structures. Recent experimental and numerical studies, from individual elements to whole, real-scale structures, have indicated that connections are among the most vulnerable and critical parts of these structures. This book synthesises the research findings on this important subject and explains the essential features in an accessible way in one single source. The book is ideal for researchers, structural engineers and fire protection engineers in their applications of performance-based fire engineering.
The book investigates various MPPT algorithms, and the optimization of solar energy using machine learning and deep learning. It will serve as an ideal reference text for senior undergraduate, graduate students, and academic researchers in diverse engineering domains including electrical, electronics and communication, computer, and environmental. This book: Discusses data acquisition by the internet of things for real-time monitoring of solar cells. Covers artificial neural network techniques, solar collector optimization, and artificial neural network applications in solar heaters, and solar stills. Details solar analytics, smart centralized control centers, integration of microgrids, and data mining on solar data. Highlights the concept of asset performance improvement, effective forecasting for energy production, and Low-power wide-area network applications. Elaborates solar cell design principles, the equivalent circuits of single and two diode models, measuring idealist factors, and importance of series and shunt resistances. The text elaborates solar cell design principles, the equivalent circuit of single diode model, the equivalent circuit of two diode model, measuring idealist factor, and importance of series and shunt resistances. It further discusses perturb and observe technique, modified P&O method, incremental conductance method, sliding control method, genetic algorithms, and neuro-fuzzy methodologies. It will serve as an ideal reference text for senior undergraduate, graduate students, and academic researchers in diverse engineering domains including electrical, electronics and communication, computer, and environmental.
Especially written for contractors and small businesses carrying out small works, Spon's House Improvement Price Guide contains accurate information on thousands of rates, each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.
The Visionary Spirit offers a vision of hope which points to a new era of emancipatory living that Mick Collins calls the Transfromocene Age. In a masterfully crafted manual, Mick Collins draws on the wisdom and knowledge of the imaginal realm, where dreams, myth and synchronicity help us to re-align to the natural world and to our innate wholeness. He describes a transformative process, from the Anthropocene and our current scale of planetary destruction, to a new era of wisdom and balance. Drawing inspiration from diverse fields such as the sacred feminine, indigenous wisdom, daimons and near-death experiences, this book is enlivened by fascinating, real-life stories of people who have engaged in deep processes of psycho-spiritual change. The Visionary Spirit is a radical manifesto for soulful and creative living. At the end of each chapter there is an exercise, providing opportunities for experiential reflection, aiding the reader on their personal journey. This is not just a deep exploration of human transformation, it is a radical proposition for new ways of living creatively, spiritually, harmoniously and responsibly on planet Earth.
Have you ever had to provide accurate costs for a new supermarket or a pub "just an idea...a ballpark figure..." ? The earlier a pricing decision has to be made, the more difficult it is to estimate the cost and the more likely the design and the specs are to change. And yet a rough-and-ready estimate is more likely to get set in stone. Spon's First Stage Estimating Handbook is the only comprehensive and reliable source of first stage estimating costs. Covering the whole spectrum of building costs and a wide range of related MandE work and landscaping work, vital cost data is presented as: costs per square metre elemental cost analyses principal rates composite rates. Compact and clear, Spon's First Stage Estimating Handbook is ideal for those key early meetings with clients. And with additional sections on whole life costing and general information, this is an essential reference for all construction professionals and clients making early judgements on the viability of new projects.
Pursuing historical analogies between nineteenth-century theories and the current practices captivated by digital reproducibility, this book offers a critical take on architecture's contemporaneity through four essays: tectonics, materiality, cladding, and labor. Fundamental to this proposition is the historicity of Gottfried Semper's theorization of architecture amidst the outpouring of new materials and construction techniques during the 1850s. Starting with Semper's differentiation between theatricalization and the tectonic of theatricality, this book closely examines thematic essential to architecture's self-representation. Even though the title of this book recalls the Semperian four elements of architecture, its argument encapsulates a unique historico-theoretical project probing the tectonic of theatricality beyond Semper. The invisible tie between technique and labor is the cord running through the four subjects covered in this book. In exploring these subjects from the theoretical standpoint of Marxian dialectics, this book's contribution is focused on, but not limited to, the topicality of labor today when its relationship with capital has been further obscured by the prevailing digitalization of commodity exchange value, starting roughly in the 1990s. Each essay examines Semper's theorization of architecture in contradistinction to the ways in which technology's mediation has dominated architecture's representation. Burrowing through the invisible tie between technique and work, asymptomatic of architecture's predicament in global capitalism, this book advances the scope of architectural criticism beyond the exhausted formalism and architecture's turn to philosophy circa the 1980s and the present tendencies for presentism. It will therefore be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history and theory.
'Poignant ... A meditation on life, love and the importance of nature' IRISH TIMES Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month by month through the year, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendours, and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.
This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010 White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next ten years for the sector. If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizenled agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resilient processes.
This book provides a thorough understanding of the general principles of measurement for taking off quantities. An essential guide to any quantity surveyor, architect or engineer. Taking off quantities: Civil Engineering demonstrates, through a series of detailed worked examples from a range of civil engineering projects, how the measurement techniques are actually used.
This book reports on cutting-edge research within the new field of active rheology control of cementitious materials, presenting new ideas developed within the ERC Advanced Grant Project, SmartCast (hosted at Ghent University), which extend the possibilities of admixtures and additions beyond current options. The research presented here develops a new method of actively controlling the rheology of fresh concrete during casting operations by incorporating specially designed responsive components. This results in real-time changes to the rheological behaviour of the cementitious material, allowing the user to intervene actively after the cementitious material has left the mixing phase. This newly gained agility contributes to increased processing speed and placement reliability in the case of traditional casting methods and can also facilitate advanced 3D concrete printing. The different routes followed to achieve this Active Rheology Control are explained within. The book suits researchers and innovative practitioners and is the first comprehensive text to present these new findings. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This book provides a source of inspiration and a manual for designers, entrepreneurs and professionals who are looking into the practical application of product configurators. In this growing profession, there is a need for a book which focuses on the configuration process from a design perspective. The book delves into the practical application of configurators using case studies of selected firms that present their most significant works. It offers the reader tips, suggestions, technical details and critical issues which need to be considered, from experienced actors and pioneers worldwide, which include: Unfold, Belgium In-flexions, France Nervous System, USA Okinlab, Germany SkimLab, France Twikit, Belgium INDG, The Netherlands ZeroLight, United Kingdom 3Dimerce, The Netherlands 3DSource, USA Bagaar, Belgium MyCustomizer, Canada Combeenation, Austria
Though few now doubt the severity of the environmental problems faced by humanity there is still resistance from businesses, developers, architects, planners and government when it comes to making the step changes necessary to make our lifestyles sustainable. Based on the experience gained from their involvement in the pioneering Beddington Zero Emission Development (or BedZED) in London, and subsequent innovative schemes, The ZEDbook authors present a bold, coherent and refreshing vision of a low carbon future. In three comprehensive sections, The ZEDbook leads the reader from basic ZEDliving principles through building physics and architectural design details to a carefully selected array of informative case studies. The ZEDbook is a must-have purchase for anyone wanting to make communities and the built environment more sustainable.
God is Green examines what the Bible has to say about humanity's relationship with and responsibility for the environment, and how Church traditions over the centuries have interpreted this. Ian Bradley argues that Christianity at its essence is a 'green faith' which has been distorted over the years. First published in 1990, this new edition of the book is revised for the contemporary state of our climate, and includes a chapter-by-chapter study guide for individuals and small groups.
Multidisciplinary Studies on the Environment and Civilization draws on research from a diverse range of fields across the humanities, social and natural sciences to discover what is needed to develop an affluent, sustainable and resilient world for the twenty-first century and beyond. The contributions throughout this volume build and promote frameworks for an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability both in and beyond Japan. Utilizing research efforts from a broad range of fields such as zoology, biological anthropology and archaeology, these multidisciplinary studies are brought together to assess the impacts humans have had on the environment as well as the role of civilization, culture and heritage in environmental history. This book provides a truly multidisciplinary approach to environmental issues and will be of great interest to graduate students and researchers in fields such as climate, geology, plant taxonomy and marine science as well as those with an interest in Japanese history, archaeology, art and literature.
This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer's fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer's work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer's work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.
All the cost data you need to keep your estimating accurate, competitive and profitable.Do you work on jobs between 50 and 50,000? - Then this book is for you.Specially written for contractors and small businesses carrying out small works, Spon's Estimating Cost Guide to Plumbing and Heating contains accurate information on thousands of rates each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.The first book to include typical project costs for: rainwater goods installations bathrooms external waste systems central heating systems hot and cold water systems.
Specifically written for contractors and small businesses carrying out small works, this second edition of Spon's Estimating Cost Guide to Small Groundworks, Landscaping Work and Gardening contains accurate information on thousands of rates, each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.This is the first book to focus on this range of external work, including garden maintenance work on blocks of flats and individual houses, schools and sports fields, garden makeovers, laying patios and paths, small land drainage schemes on farmland, and small-scale local authority maintenance work.
The first book to look at gender as a specific subject in urban history across Europe A great overview of a very broad timespan Will be of interested to gender historians as well as urban historians |
You may like...
Alliances for Sustainable Futures…
Jaap Boonstra, Marcos Eguiguren
Hardcover
R2,431
Discovery Miles 24 310
The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book…
Christine Pierce, Donald VanDeVeer
Paperback
Handbook of Multi-Level Climate Actions…
Mark Starik, Gordon P. Rands, …
Hardcover
R5,385
Discovery Miles 53 850
Environment - An Interdisciplinary…
Glenn Adelson, James Engell, …
Paperback
|