![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Human geography > General
Sustainable Energy Transition for Cities brings together empirical and applied research in both urban planning and sustainable energy, offering coherent and innovative best practices for urban energy transition planning. Using a multidisciplinary framework, the book views cities as an integrated system composed of components such as neighborhoods and districts within an overall net-zero energy balance. Intended for academics, practitioners and policymakers interested in sustainable energy transition, the book offers insights and best practices to promote the transition to a low carbon urban society.
Since first emerging as an issue of concern in the late 1960s, fear of crime has become one of the most researched topics in contemporary criminology and receives considerable attention in a range of other disciplines including social ecology, social psychology and geography. Researchers looking the subject have consistently uncovered alarming characteristics, primarily relating to the behavioural responses that people adopt in relation to their fear of crime. This book reports on research conducted over the past eight years, in which efforts have been made to pioneer the combination of techniques from behavioural geography with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in order to map the fear of crime. The first part of the book outlines the history of research into fear of crime, with an emphasis on the many approaches that have been used to investigate the problem and the need for a spatially-explicit approach. The second part provides a technical break down of the GIS-based techniques used to map fear of crime and summarises key findings from two separate study sites. The authors describe collective avoidance behaviour in relation to disorder decline models such as the Broken Windows Thesis, the potential to integrate fear mapping with police-community partnerships and emerging avenues for further research. Issues discussed include fear of crime in relation to housing prices and disorder, the use of fear mapping as a means with which to monitor the impact of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) and fear mapping in transit environments.
This is a book on how and why workers come together. Almost coincident with its inception, worker organisation is a central and enduring element of capitalism. In the 19th and 20th centuries' mobilisation by workers played a substantial role in reshaping critical elements of these societies in Europe, North America, Australasia and elsewhere including the introduction of minimum labour standards (living wage rates, maximum hours etc), workplace safety and compensation laws and the rise of welfare state more generally. Notwithstanding setbacks in recent decades, worker organisation represents a pivotal countervailing force to moderate the excesses of capitalism and is likely to become even more influential as the social consequences of rising global inequality become more manifest. Indeed, instability and periodic shifts in the respective influence of capital and labour are endemic to capitalism. As formal institutions have declined in some countries or unions outlawed and severely repressed in others, there has been growing recognition of informal strike activity by workers and wider alliances between unions and community organisations in others. While such developments are seen as new they aren't. Indeed, understanding of worker organisation is often ahistorical and even those understandings informed by historical research are, this book will argue, in need of revision. This book provides a new perspective on and new insights into how and why workers organise, and what shapes this organisation. The Origins of Worker Mobilisation will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers the fields of industrial relations, HRM, labour economics, labour history and related disciplines.
During recent years, the topic of participation has increasingly been gaining importance in Iran - in the scientific field, in practice and rhetoric. However, in current scientific literature - and especially in English literature - there is little knowledge on the conditions, legal background, perceptions, experiences and processes of citizens' participation in Iran. This book aims to shed light on the paradoxical question of participation in Iran: it is old and new, dysfunctioning and functioning, disappointing and promising. This slippery status of participation convinces scholars to suggest contradictory interpretations and understandings about the existence, functionality, and potentiality of this concept. The book therefore shows the different perspectives, interpretations, historical developments and case studies of participation in Iran, thus giving the reader a kaleidoscope view on the question of participation in Iran.
The concept of territorial stigma, as developed in large part by the urban sociologist Loic Wacquant, contends that certain groups of people are devalued, discredited and tainted by the reputation of the place where they reside. This book argues that this theory is more relevant and comprehensive than others that have been used to frame and understand ostracised neighbourhoods and their populations (for example segregation and the racialisation of place) and allows for an inclusive interpretation of the many spatial facets of marginalisation processes. Advancing conceptual understanding of how territorial stigmatisation and its components unfold materially as well as symbolically, this book presents a wide range of case studies from the Global South and Global North, including an examination of recent policy measures that have been applied to deal with the consequences of territorial stigmatisation. It introduces readers to territorial stigmatisation's strategic deployment but also illustrates, in a number of regional contexts, the attachments that residents at times develop for the stigmatised places in which they live and the potential counter-forces that are developed against territorial stigmatisation by a variety of different groups.
This book presents accounts of fieldwork conducted in French Louisiana by anthropologists and folklorists between the 1970s and 2000 and looks at the personal, ethical, political, and scientific issues researchers need to confront and resolve when they attempt to explain a modern complex culture by using the traditional tools and methods of anthropology, participant observation, and interviews. The study casts a critical look at the core anthropological concepts of field, informants, and knowledge. In line with the ongoing reassessment of these concepts, it proposes that the field, identities, and knowledge acquired through research are not set, given entities but rather are a matter of construction. It shows how the personal profiles of the researchers (native or outsider, activist or academic, man or woman, black or white) contribute to frame the research. It illustrates the shifting of these identities during and after the research in response to personal, relational, and political circumstances. It also considers the application of the knowledge derived from research in the fields of tourism, cultural activism, and language policy in the context of the cultural renaissance experienced by Cajuns and Creoles over the past decades.
This book proposes an alternative strategy to improve and sustain prosperity, through the creation of an entrepreneurial culture in learning cities or city regions. The edited collection provides insights into how entrepreneurship, education, job creation and social inclusion can be aligned through entrepreneurial learning, in the context of territorial development. With rich and varied contributions from a wide field, including policy makers, entrepreneurs, an investment banker, leaders of universities and councils, the voluntary sector, scientists, educators and students, it reviews and assesses how learning cities and regions may become more prosperous by investing in the development of entrepreneurial skills throughout lifelong learning. Reinforced by examples on developing and retaining entrepreneurial people, this book contributes to our understanding of how entrepreneurial learning can be fostered in different city and city-region contexts. It makes an interesting contribution to the field in terms of mapping out complex issues and testing the practical validity of the concept, while also providing rich and insightful case studies centred on the Welsh experience with entrepreneurial learning city regions. The high quality international contributions demonstrate the new worldwide interest in developing an entrepreneurial culture for the benefit of a city or region, rather than an entrepreneurial mind-set for individual benefit. This fascinating subject will be of interest to many social scientists, policymakers, and practitioners. It will be found especially valuable for professionals involved in economic, inclusive and sustainable city or regional development.
In conventional views, pastoralism was classified as a stage of civilization that needed to be abolished and transcended in order to reach a higher level of development. In this context, global approaches to modernize a rural society have been ubiquitous phenomena independent of ideological contexts. The 20th century experienced a variety of concepts to settle mobile groups and to transfer their lifestyles to modern perceptions. Permanent settlements are the vivid expression of an ideology-driven approach. Modernization theory captured all walks of life and tried to optimize breeding techniques, pasture utilization, transport and processing concepts. New insights into other aspects of pastoralism such as its role as an adaptive strategy to use marginal resources in remote locations with difficult access could only be understood as a critique of capitalist and communist concepts of modernization. In recent years a renaissance of modernization theory-led development activities can be observed. Higher inputs from external funding, fencing of pastures and settlement of pastoralists in new townships are the vivid expression of 'modern' pastoralism in urban contexts. The new modernization programme incorporates resettlement and transformation of lifestyles as to be justified by environmental pressure in order to reduce degradation in the age of climate change.
This book is the result of a three day workshop on "Evaluation in theory and practice in spatial planning" held in Ramsey Hall, University College London, in September 1996. Some 30 people from 8 different countries attended and 20 papers were presented. The majority of them now form the basis for this book. This occasion was the third on the topic, the two preceding having taken place in Umea in June 1992 and in Bari in 1994. Following these three meetings, we can now say that this small, industrious, international family really enjoy meeting up from time to time at each others places, in the presence of older members and new children, each one presenting his/her own recent experiences. It particularly enjoys exchanging views and arguing about the current state and the future of evaluation in spatial planning (all families have their vices ... ). It is also pleasing to see these experiences and discussions resulting in a book for those who could not attend and for the broader clan in the field. Not long time ago, but ages in the accelerated academic time scale, evaluation in planning established its own role and distinct features as an instrument for helping the decision-making process. Now this role and these features are exposed to major challenges. First, the evolution of planning theory has lead to the conception of new planning paradigms, based on theories of complexity and communicative rationality.
Artistic practices have long been disturbing the relationships between art and space. They have challenged the boundaries of performer/spectator, of public/private, introduced intervention and installation, ephemerality and performance, and constantly sought out new modes of distressing expectations about what is construed as art. But when we expand the world in which we look at art, how does this change our understanding of critical artistic practice? This book presents a global perspective on the relationship between art and the city. International and leading scholars and artists themselves present critical theory and practice of contemporary art as a politicised force. It extends thinking on contemporary arts practices in the urban and political context of protest and social resilience and offers the prism of a 'critical artscape' in which to view the urgent interaction of arts and the urban politic. The global appeal of the book is established through the general topic as well as the specific chapters, which are geographically, socially, politically and professionally varied. Contributing authors come from many different institutional and anti-institutional perspectives from across the world. This will be valuable reading for those interested in cultural geography, urban geography and urban culture, as well as contemporary art theorists, practitioners and policymakers.
In the mid-1990s, the state government of Maharashtra introduced an innovative strategy of slum redevelopment in its capital city, Mumbai (Bombay). Based on demolishing existing slums and rebuilding on the same sites at a higher density, it is very distinct from the two prevalent conventional strategies with respect to slums in developing countries - slum clearance and slum upgrading. So why did the slum redevelopment strategy originate in Mumbai, and how did it do so? What were the key issues in the implementation of such a project? This critical volume responds to these questions by closely examining one particular redevelopment project over a period of twelve years: the Markandeya Cooperative Housing Society (MCHS). It analyzes the problems faced and the solutions innovated; identifies non-traditional issues often overlooked in housing improvement strategies; reveals the complexities involved in housing production for low-income groups; and combines in-depth empirical research with historical, institutional, spatial and financial perspectives to improve our understanding of complex urban development processes.
In August 1989, a Summer Institute was held at the Academie van Bouwkunst, the seventeenth century home of Amsterdam's School of Architecture, Town Planning and Landscape. The meeting brought together experts in Geographical Information Systems from throughout the world to address an international audience of planners. The contents of this book reflect many of the themes that were presented and discussed at the conference. The Summer Institute, let alone this volume, would not have been possible without the support of the International Association for the Development and Management of Existing and New Towns (INTNAIVN), the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISoCaRP), The National Physical Planning Agency of the Netherlands (RPD) and the Berlage Studio. We wish to acknowledge the assistance provided by these organisations and by the various sponsors: The Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning and Environment, the Municipality of Amsterdam, Logisterion b.v., ESRI, UNISYS, MABON b.v., SPSS, PRIME Computer Inc., PANDATA. The provision of hardware facilities by the various computer companies allowed immensely valuable 'hands on' experience to be gained by all the participants.
A] revealing reflection and interpretation upon the development of post-World War II Europe. It offers a vision of imposed borders and boundaries that have become familiar yet remain disturbing; such a dichotomy is explored in various ways in the essays to make a provocative and fascinating book. The book is especially strong in the combination of the empirical and theoretical, treating borders and boundaries at many different levels from the purely physical to the social, cultural and political, as well as the symbolic. It is]...a very welcome addition to the field." . Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge The volume is interdisciplinary and broadly conceptualized yet it focuses on some key aspects that give the volume sufficient focus and depth. The quality of the contributions (including the substantive introduction) is consistently high... and] not merely a collection of pieces from various disciplines; instead many contributions speak to one another across individual disciplines, e.g., in a consideration of the ambivalent or contradictory effects of walls and boundaries-culturally, historically, and socially. . Friederike Eigler, Georgetown University How is it that walls, borders, boundaries-and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion-engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe's historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities. Marc Silberman is Professor of German and Affiliate Professor in Theatre and Drama as well as Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published extensively on twentieth and twenty-first century German literature, film, and theater. Karen E. Till is Lecturer of Cultural Geography at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and co-convener of the 'Mapping Spectral Traces' international network. She is author of "The New Berlin," co-editor of "Textures of Place," and working on a book project, "Wounded Cities." Janet Ward is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of "Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity" and "Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany." Her current work includes a co-edited collection on (trans)nationalism and the German city, and a book project on urban destruction and reconstruction.
China's unprecedented urbanization is underpinned by not only massive rural-urban migration but also a household registration system embedded in a territorial hierarchy that produces lingering urban-rural duality. The mid-1990s onwards witnessed increasing reliance on land revenues by municipal governments, causing repeated redrawing of city boundaries to incorporate surrounding countryside. The identification of real estate as a growth anchor further fueled urban expansion. Sprawling commodity housing estates proliferate on urban-rural fringes, juxtaposed with historical villages undergoing intense densification. The traditional urban core and work-unit compounds also undergo wholesale redevelopment. Alongside large influx of migrants, major reshuffling of population has taken place inside metropolitan areas. Chinese cities today are more differentiated than ever, with new communities superimposing and superseding older ones. The rise of the urban middle class, in particular, has facilitated the formation of homeowners' associations, and poses major challenges to hitherto state dominated local governance. The present volume tries to more deeply unravel and delineate the intertwining forms and processes outlined above from a variety of angles: circulatory, mobility and precariousness; urbanization, diversity and segregation; and community and local governance. Contributors include scholars of Chinese cities from mainland China, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and the United States. This volume was previously published as a special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics.
Although anthropologists and cultural geographers have explored "place" in various senses, little cross-cultural examination of "kinds of place," or ecotopes, has been presented from an ethno-ecological perspective. In this volume, indigenous and local understandings of landscape are investigated in order to better understand how human communities relate to their terrestrial and aquatic resources. The contributors go beyond the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) literature and offer valuable insights on ecology and on land and resources management, emphasizing the perception of landscape above the level of species and their folk classification. Focusing on the ways traditional people perceive and manage land and biotic resources within diverse regional and cultural settings, the contributors address theoretical issues and present case studies from North America, Mexico, Amazonia, tropical Asia, Africa and Europe.
The title of the book -- Implicate Relations -- is suggested as a notion which characterizes the nature of social relations in general and the relations between Israelis and Palestinians in particular. According to it, Israelis and Palestinians, as societies and as individuals, are not definable independently of each other. In a kind of implicate relation one is enfolded within the other to the extent that Palestinian national identity can be seen as a Zionist creation. Implicate relations further implies that societies are socio-spatial entities which come into being and acquire their collective self-consciousness and self-identity through a process of spatial dialectics. As illustrated throughout the discussions in the book, spatial dialectics was the process through which European Jews were driven into an identity crisis once their (spatial) Ghetto walls disintegrated and they thus became conscious of their nationalist-political identity. And it is this process through which, several decades later, the Arabs in Israel were forced into an identity crisis and became conscious of their Palestinian national identity once the Zionists had defined the boundaries of their future Jewish state. It is also the process through which Israelis and Palestinians became engaged in implicate relations. This is illustrated in the book by reference to historical events which have led to the emergence of Israelis and Palestinians as socio-spatial entities, and by means of empirical analyses of Palestinian labour in Israel, Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and cognititive maps of Israelis and Palestinians. These empirical analyses are based on data collected in three large-scale fieldsurveys among Palestinian workers and job hunters in Israel, and among Israeli settlers in the occupied territories.
Writing regions, undertaking a regional study, was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically, or arguing culturally, historically, and politically with regions, was deemed to be old-fashioned. Yet the region is, and always will be, a central geographical concept, and thinking about regions can tell us a lot about the history of the discipline called geography. Despite taking up an identifiable place within the geographical imagination in scholarship and beyond, region remains a relatively forgotten, under-used, and in part under-theorised term. Reanimating Regions marks the continued reinvigoration of a set of disciplinary debates surrounding regions, the regional, and regional geography. Across 18 chapters from international, interdisciplinary scholars, this book writes and performs region as a temporary permanence, something held stable, not fixed and absolute, at different points in time, for different purposes. There is, as this expansive volume outlines, no single reading of a region. Reanimating Regions collectively rebalances the region within geography and geographical thought. In renewing the geography of regions as not only a site of investigation but also as an analytical framework through which to write the world, what emerges is a powerful reworking of the geographic imagination. Read against one another, the chapters weave together timely commentaries on region and regions across the globe, with a particular emphasis upon the regional as played out in the United Kingdom, and regional worlds both within and beyond Europe, offering chapters from Africa and South America. Addressing both the political and the cultural, this volume responds to the need for a consolidated and considered reflection on region, the regional, and regional geography, speaking directly to broader intellectual concerns with performance, aesthetics, identity, mobilities, the environment, and the body.
The revival of interest in collective cultural memories since the 1980s has been a genuinely global phenomenon. Cultural memories can be defined as the social constructions of the past that allow individuals and groups to orient themselves in time and space. The investigation of cultural memories has necessitated an interdisciplinary perspective, though geographical questions about the spaces, places, and landscapes of memory have acquired a special significance. The essays in this volume, written by leading anthropologists, geographers, historians, and psychologists, open a range of new interpretations of the formation and development of cultural memories from ancient times to the present day. The volume is divided into five interconnected sections. The first section outlines the theoretical considerations that have shaped recent debates about cultural memory. The second section provides detailed case studies of three key themes: the founding myths of the nation-state, the contestation of national collective memories during periods of civil war, and the oral traditions that move beyond national narrative. The third section examines the role of World War II as a pivotal episode in an emerging European cultural memory. The fourth section focuses on cultural memories in postcolonial contexts beyond Europe. The fifth and final section extends the study of cultural memory back into premodern tribal and nomadic societies.
Haiti is a country which, until the earthquake of 2010, remained largely outside the focus of world interest and outside the important international historical currents during its existence as a free nation. The nineteenth century was the decisive period in Haitian history, serving to shape the class structure, the political tradition and the economic system. During most of this period, Haiti had little contact with both its immediate neighbours and the industrialised nations of the world, which led to the development of Haiti as a peasant nation. This title, first published in 1979, examines the factors responsible for the poverty of the Haitian peasant, by using both traditional economic models as well as a multidisciplinary approach incorporating economics and other branches of social science. The analysis deals primarily with the Haitian peasant economy from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, examining in depth the explanations for the secular tendency of rural per capita incomes to decline during this period.
This book provides an in-depth investigation into the practices of animal housing systems with international contributions from across the humanities and social sciences. By attending to a range of different sites such as the zoo, the laboratory, the farm and the animal shelter, to name a few, the book explores material technologies from the perspective that these are integrated parts of a larger biopolitical infrastructure and questions how animal housing systems, and the physical infrastructures that surround central human-animal practices, come into being. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138854116_oaChapter11.pdf
Compared to many other regions of the world, Africa is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and variability. Widespread poverty, an extensive disease burden and pockets of political instability across the continent has resulted in a low resilience and limited adaptative capacity of African society to climate related shocks and stresses. To compound this vulnerability, there remains large knowledge gaps on African climate, manifestations of future climate change and variability for the region and the associated problems of climate change impacts. Research on the subject of African climate change requires an interdisciplinary approach linking studies of environmental, political and socio-economic spheres. In this book we use different case studies on climate change and variability in Africa to illustrate different approaches to the study of climate change in Africa from across the spectrum of physical, social and political sciences. In doing so we attempt to highlight a toolbox of methodologies (along with their limitations and advantages) that may be used to further the understanding of the impacts of climate change in Africa and thus help form the basis for strategies to negate the negative implications of climate change on society.
First published in 1991, this title provides a comprehensive and objective account of the basis of 'green' arguments and their social and political implications. By the beginning of the 1990s, environmental awareness had become widespread, popular, and fashionable throughout the West, adopted by politicians, manufacturers and advertising agencies. The book sets out to explain why and how the 'green wave' developed, and examines the forces still shaping green politics and policies at an international level. With important implications across the fields of Sociology, Development Studies and Environment and Sustainability, this reissue will be valuable to a broad student and research readership. |
You may like...
Procedural Meaning: Problems and…
Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti, …
Hardcover
R4,549
Discovery Miles 45 490
Implantable Sensor Systems for Medical…
Andreas Inmann, Diana Hodgins
Hardcover
R4,749
Discovery Miles 47 490
Iterative Learning Stabilization and…
Limin Wang, Ridong Zhang, …
Hardcover
R2,692
Discovery Miles 26 920
|