Providing concisely written entries on the most important current issues in Central Asia and Eurasia, this atlas offers relevant background information on the region s place in the contemporary political and economic world.

Features include:

• Profiles of the constituent countries of Central Asia, namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan
• Profiles of Mongolia, western China, Tibet, and the three Caucasus states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia
• Timely and significant original maps and data for each entry
• A comprehensive glossary, places index and subject index of major concepts, terms and regional issues
• Bibliography and useful websites section

Designed for use in teaching undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars in geography, history, economics, anthropology, international relations, political science and the environment as well as regional courses on the Former Soviet Union, Central Asia, and Eurasia, this atlas is also a comprehensive reference source for libraries and scholars interested in these fields.

This work is part of a series of original articles on research in social movements, conflicts and change. It carries papers that are broad in scope and methodologically diverse.

This book highlights the importance of diversity in overcoming issues of social and environmental degradation. It presents conceptual and practical strategies to celebrate local and Indigenous knowledge for improved community development and environmental management. David Harvey has proclaimed, "The geography we make must be a peoples' geography." This clarion call challenges geographers around the world to consider the power and potential of geographic knowledge as the basis for social action - a call this book answers, providing readers the theoretical and conceptual tools needed to understand the social world and empowering them to mobilize social change. The author uses empirical case studies of two environmental management and community development projects to document how knowledge generation is "essentially locally situated and socially derived." In doing so she charts a path for moving beyond what Vandana Shiva so aptly describes as "monocultures of the mind." The book argues that local and Indigenous knowledge must not be seen in opposition to scientific knowledge, as none of these knowledge traditions hold all the answers to localized socio-environmental problems. Rather, as the author explores through a set of processes and strategies to enable, support and celebrate 'cultural hybridity' at the local environmental governance scale, these respective knowledge systems can learn to speak to each other. Such dialogue has the potential to support more sustainable outcomes at multiple environmental governance locales. This book will be of interest to everyone involved in environmental policy, planning or politics, and for those who want to make this planet a more sustainable and just place.

This book analyzes the recent growth of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Hong Kong, seven major Chinese coastal cities. The authors detail theoretical mechanisms, spatial and non-spatial models of development, all while exploring possible directions to sustainability. They also look at how these cities have developed over the last 30 years, from the late 1970s to the 21st century. Each has its own unique background, regional and national positions, advantages, and functions. Using diversified approaches and measurements for each city, the authors argue that structural changes are necessary to achieve much needed sustainable development. The book covers developmental issues such as the regaining of central city and global city statuses, the role of governments in steering development, and achieving goals through mega projects, urban competitiveness, positioning, and branding. Including varied assessment and intense suggestions for structural changes, this book addresses core concerns for the sustainable growth of these metropolises. A valuable book for students, researchers and policy makers.

Urban regions have come under increasing pressure to adapt to the imperatives of mobility, including greater freedom of travel, rising trade volumes and global economic networks. Whereas urbanization was once characterized by the concentration of services and facilities, urban areas now have to ensure the exchange of goods, services and information in a much more complex, interrelated, highly competitive, and spatially dispersed environment. As a consequence, cities are challenged to ensure the functionality of infrastructure while mitigating negative environmental and social impacts.
Cities, Regions and Flows brings together debates in a single volume to present a theoretical framework for understanding the changing relationship between places and movement. It analyses the significance of flows of goods for urban and regional development and emphasises the twin processes of integration and disintegration that result from goods movement within urban space. It discusses urban regions as nodes for organizing the exchange of goods, services and information against a background of socio-economic and technological change, as well as new patterns of urbanization. The new logistics concepts and practices that have been developed in response to these changes exert both integrative and disintegrative effects on cities and regions. It also considers how urban policies are dealing with related challenges concerning infrastructure provision, land use, local labour markets and environmental sustainability.
Cities, Regions and Flows contains thoughtfully prepared case studies from five different continents on how cities manage to become part of value chains and how they strive for accessibility in an increasingly competitive environment. This book will be on interest to policy-makers and advanced classes in planning, geography, urban studies and transportation.

Advances in Geo-Spatial Information Science presents recent advances regarding fundamental issues of geo-spatial information science (space and time, spatial analysis, uncertainty modeling and geo-visualization), and new scientific and technological research initiatives for geo-spatial information science (such as spatial data mining, mobile data modeling, and location-based services). The book contains selected and revised papers presented at the joint International Conference on Theory, Data Handling and Modelling in GeoSpatial Information Science (Hong Kong, 26 28 May 2010), and brings together three related international academic communities: spatial information science, spatial data handling, and modeling geographic systems.

Advances in Geo-Spatial Information Science will be of interest for academics and professionals interested in spatial information science, spatial data handling, and modeling of geographic systems.

This book offers fresh insights into how companies can engage with, and make use of, the modern metropolis. Based on actor-network theory and the resource-based view of the firm, it demonstrates how the contemporary city can be seen - and used - as a resource for corporate innovation. The main argument is that companies have to build what the author calls "urban innovation networks." After a theory-based outline of such networks, the author demonstrates the extent to which different institutional players - companies such as Audi, Ikea and Siemens, but also arts institutions like the Haus der Kunst in Munich - are already working to create them. The book combines management thinking with urban theory and the sociology of networks to create a unique blend of different views of capitalism and space, offering a new perspective on both the modern metropolis and globally operating companies active within our distinctly urban culture.

Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study of the role that humankind plays in shaping the world around us. Whether it's environmental concerns, the cities we live in or the globalization of the economy, these are issues which affect us all. This book introduces these topics and more including: global environment issues and development cities, firms and regions migration, immigration and asylum landscape, culture and identity travel, mobility and tourism agriculture and food. Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter summaries, case study boxes, further reading lists and a glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for anybody new to the study of human geography.

This is the 20th volume in a series of research articles in social movements, conflicts and change. The papers are broad in scope and methodologically diverse.

Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities. The ritual, performative and embodied geographies of borderzones, non-places, transitional spaces, or 'spaces in-between' are often discussed in terms of the liminal, yet there have been few attempts to problematize the concept, or to rethink how ideas of the liminal might find critical resonance with contemporary developments in the study of place, space and mobility. Liminal Landscapes fills this void by bringing together variety of new and emerging methodological approaches of liminality from varying disciplines to explore new theoretical perspectives on mobility, space and socio-cultural experience. By doing so, it offers new insight into contemporary questions about technology, surveillance, power, the city, and post-industrial modernity within the context of tourism and mobility. The book draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, film, media and cultural studies, art and visual culture, and tourism studies. It brings together recent research from scholars with international reputations in the fields of tourism, mobility, landscape and place, alongside the work of emergent scholars who are developing new insights and perspectives in this area. This timely intervention is the first collection to offer an interdisciplinary account of the intersection between liminality and landscape in terms of space, place and identity. It therefore charts new directions in the study of liminal spaces and mobility practices and will be valuable reading for range of students, researchers and academics interested in this field.

Community visioning is key in helping local public officials and community leaders create a flourishing future for their cities, and is essential for the effective planning and implementation of these strategies. Visioning involves collaborative goal setting to motivate actions - of planners, citizens, and officials - in order to design and carry out a strategic planning process for the successful development of the community. The use of visioning since the 1980s has led to a wealth of information on the productivity of the paths it has taken. The contributors, all with experience working in the area, review the successes and failures of the strategies, and look at new innovations which are pushing the frontiers of community visioning. This review of the development of visioning focuses on small and medium sized communities in North America. It aims to guide citizens, local leaders and planners on what strategies are best to help them revitalise their communities and ensure a prosperous future.

Amazonia exists in our imagination as well as on the ground. It is a mysterious and powerful construct in our psyches yet shares multiple (trans)national borders and diverse ecological and cultural landscapes. It is often presented as a seemingly homogeneous place: a lush tropical jungle teeming with exotic wildlife and plant diversity, as well as the various indigenous populations that inhabit the region. Yet, since Conquest, Amazonia has been linked to the global market and, after a long and varied history of colonization and development projects, Amazonia is peopled by many distinct cultural groups who remain largely invisible to the outside world despite their increasing integration into global markets and global politics. Millions of rubber tappers, neo-native groups, peasants, river dwellers, and urban residents continue to shape and re-shape the cultural landscape as they adapt their livelihood practices and political strategies in response to changing markets and shifting linkages with political and economic actors at local, regional, national, and international levels. This book explores the diversity of changing identities and cultural landscapes emerging in different corners of this rapidly changing region. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

This book presents a new approach to heritage, linking it to territory and sustainable development. This new approach entails a broader, integrated view of heritage values on the one hand, and on the other a shift in emphasis from their protection to their valorisation. In short, it provides a view of the joint workings of natural and cultural resources, and, as a consequence, moving away from a protection point of view in favour of a perspective on their suitable sustainable valorisation. In the viewpoint taken here, sustainability is understood as the balance and long-term preservation and enhancement of such natural and cultural resources and processes in a given territory. Territorial Heritage and Development includes contributions from different disciplines (geography, architecture, planning, sociology, environmental studies and archaeology) and case studies drawn from three continents, broaching both analytical and conceptual developments, and a range of initiatives for engaging in territorial heritage as an instrument of sustainable development. The book takes a pioneering and relevant approach to the breadth and complexity of the issue which can be valuable to academics and policy-makers in Geography, Architecture, Planning and Sociology.

This book analyses the key forces affecting the affordability of rural homes in Britain and the changing shape of housing markets. It takes as its starting point, demographic trends impacting upon rural communities and upon market dynamics. From this point, it explores consequent patterns of housing affordability, examining changing opportunities in the rental and sale markets, at different spatial scales. The book also focuses on how markets are analysed, and how data are selectively used to demonstrate low levels of affordability, or a lack of need for additional housing in small village locations. Building on the demographic theme, the book considers the housing implications of an aging population, before the focus finally shifts to community initiative in the face of housing undersupply and planning's future role in delivering and procuring a more constant and predictable supply of affordable homes. In a speculative conclusion, the book ends by examining the current political trajectory in England, and the prospects for housing in the countryside in the context of localism and neighbourhood planning at a village level. This book was published as a special issue of Planning Practice and Research.

In recent years, major sporting and cultural events such as the Olympic Games have emerged as significant elements of public policy, particularly in efforts to achieve urban regeneration. As well as opportunities arising from new venues, these events are viewed as a way of stimulating investment, gaining civic engagement and publicizing progress to assist the urban regeneration process more generally. However, the pursuit of regeneration involving events is a practice that is poorly understood, controversial and risky. Events and Urban Regeneration is the first book dedicated to the use of events in regeneration. It explores the relationship between events and regeneration by analyzing a range of cities and a range of sporting and cultural events projects. It considers various theoretical perspectives to provide insight into why major events are important to contemporary cites. It examines the different ways that events can assist regeneration, as well as problems and issues associated with this unconventional form of public policy. It identifies key issues faced by those tasked with using events to assist regeneration and suggests how practices could be improved in the future. The book adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing together ideas from the geography, urban planning and tourism literatures, as well as from the emerging events and regeneration fields. It illustrates arguments with a range of international case studies placed within and at the end of chapters to show positive outcomes that have been achieved and examples of high profile failures. This timely book is essential reading for students and practitioners who are interested in events, urban planning, urban geography and tourism.

The book is aimed at a wide audience, including academics, economic geography, spatial planning and regional policy researchers, institutional leaders and managers, national and institutional policy makers, practitioners, administrators, master's and senior bachelor's students on related courses, general readers. A list of courses and corresponding programmes in Geography, Planning, Economics and Management will be prepared later.

Many Europeans think that town twinning has greatly contributed to integration in Europe after the Second World War. This book, based on observations and interviews with twinning practitioners in small towns, reveals the social and cultural processes that inform twinning as a transnational practice, its perspectives and its limits.

More than half of the global and around eighty per cent of the western population grow up in cities. This text provides a vivid picture of children and youth in the city, how they make sense of it and how they appropriate it through their social actions.

Considering the causes and forms of social inequalities in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and geographical location, this book discusses specific issues such as poverty, homelessness and work. Each chapter draws on examples from both the developed and developing world, and throughout the chapters, the book:

• contrasts experiences of growing up in the city
• discusses how social inequalities, together with societal perceptions of childhood and youth, shape experiences of growing up in cities for different young people
• examines how young people appropriate the city through social and cultural practices
• considers contemporary movements towards the role of children and youths in planning processes.

Children, Youth and the City argues that young people must be recognized as urban social agents in their own right. This informative book deals with complex theoretical arguments and relates key ideas to this topical subject in a clear and coherent manner. The text is enlivened throughout with global case studies, photographs, discussion questions, suggested reading and websites. It is an excellent resource for students of Human Geography, Urban Studies and Childhood Studies.

Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.

First published in 1970, this groundbreaking investigation into Entropy in Urban and Regional Modelling provides an extensive and detailed insight into the entropy maximising method in the development of a whole class of urban and regional models. The book has its origins in work being carried out by the author in 1966, when he realised that the well-known gravity model could be derived on the basis of an analogy with statistical, rather than Newtonian, mechanics. Subsequent investigation demonstrated that the entropy maximising method stems from an even higher level of generality, and the beginning of the book is devoted to an account of its importance and use as a general modelling tool. This reissue will be welcomed by a range of students and professionals from fields as diverse as urban and regional studies, economics, geography, planning, civil engineering, mathematics and statistics.

The study of Cosmopolitanism has been transformed in the last 20 years and the subject itself has become highly discussed across the social sciences and the humanities. The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism pursues distinct theoretical orientations and empirical analyses, bringing together mainstream discussions with the newest thinking and developments on the main themes, debates and controversies surrounding the subject. The contributions are grouped into three parts, each reflecting a different analytical focus within a variety of intellectual disciplines and methodological approaches. Part I (Cultural Cosmopolitanism) is primarily concerned with the empirically-grounded aspects of cosmopolitanism which are apparent in mundane practices and lifestyle options on the micro-scale of daily interactions. It focuses on the outlooks and lived experience of ordinary individuals and groups in concrete situational contexts and social structures. Part II (Political Cosmopolitanism) sets out the main topics and issues dealt with by scholars writing within the tradition of political cosmopolitanism. Addressing timely issues such as human rights, global justice, and global democracy, it focuses on Cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political ideal and a political project to devise new forms of supranational and transnational governance. Part III (Debates) reflects the major debates and controversies on the subject and deliberately eschews any bland consensus to instead foreground the key arguments and lively intellectual discussions in play across disciplinary divisions. Featuring contributions from key thinkers in the field, including Ulrich Beck, David Held and Martha Nussbaum, this comprehensive volume will be a valuable resource for all academics and students working within this area of study.

This book examines the effects of high and volatile food prices during 2007-08 on low-income farmers and consumers in developing, transition, and industrialized countries. Previous studies of this crisis have mostly used models to estimate the likely impacts. This volume includes actual evidence from the field as to how higher prices affected access to food and farm income among poor people. In addition to country and regional case studies, the book presents discussions of cross-cutting themes, including gender, risk management, violence, the importance of subsistence farming as a coping strategy, and the role of governments and markets in addressing higher prices.

With 2011 witnessing an unprecedentedly high level of food prices, the findings and policy recommendations presented here should prove useful to both scholars and policy makers in understanding the causes and consequences, as well as the policies needed to ensure food security in light of the skyrocketing cost of food.

This book was published as a special double issue of Development in Practice.

Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined crises of climate change and the global economic system? Will falling back on the wisdoms that contributed to the crisis help us to find ways forward or simply reconfigure risk in another guise? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and global economic restructuring require a re-thinking of the priorities, processes and underlying values that shape contemporary development aspirations and policy.

This volume brings together leading scholars to address these questions from several disciplinary perspectives: environmental sociology, human geography, international development, systems thinking, political sciences, philosophy, economics and policy/management science. The book is divided into four sections that examine contemporary development discourses and practices. It bridges geographical and disciplinary divides and includes chapters on innovative governance that confront unsustainable economic and environmental relations in both developing and developed contexts. It emphasises the ways in which dominant development paths have necessarily forced a separation of individuals from nature, but also from society and even from self . These three levels of alienation each form a thread that runs through the book. There are different levels and opportunities for a transition towards resilience, raising questions surrounding identity, governance and ecological management. This places resilience at the heart of the contemporary crisis of capitalism, and speaks to the relationship between the increasingly global forms of economic development and the difficulties in framing solutions to the environmental problems that carbon-based development brings in its wake.. Existing social science can help in not only identifying the challenges but also potential pathways for making change locally and in wider political, economic and cultural systems, but it must do so by identifying transitions out of carbon dependency and the kind of political challenges they imply for reflexive individuals and alternative community approaches to human security and wellbeing.

Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism contains contributions from leading scholars to produce a rich and cohesive set of arguments, from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. It analyses the problem of resilience under existing circumstances, but also goes beyond this to seek ways in which resilience can provide a better pathway and template for a more sustainable future. This volume will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Human Geography, Environmental Policy, and Politics.

First published in 1966 these collected papers, written by the distinguished and visionary climatologist Hubert H. Lamb, describe how climates come about and give a history of climatic changes from the last ice-age to the 1960s.

First published in 1988, this is a reissue of a groundbreaking collection of essays written by Hubert Lamb, one of the world's foremost experts on weather and climate and a uniquely authoritative voice in the history of climatology. Hubert Lamb is able to provide a mature assessment of the effect of weather on people, and vice versa. His is a uniquely authoritative voice in the current debates about today's environment and the prospects for the future.

After a general introduction the book is divided into three parts. The first part consists of a chronological series of portraits of climate and its impact on human affairs and the environment. These extend from the warm climates of the geological past to the current drought in Africa. There are several studies of the last few centuries and, in particular, of the various effects of the so-called ?little Ice Age?. The second part is concerned with the causes and mechanisms of climate and weather changes, including chapters discussing Christmas weather, fronts and volcanoes. In the final part Hubert Lamb looks to the future, and attempts to put into perspective some of the pessimistic forecasts currently available. The text, which is consistently authoritative but always readable, is augmented by numerous maps, diagrams and photographs.