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Books > Earth & environment > Regional & area planning > Urban & municipal planning > General
This book provides an interdisciplinary lens for exploring, assessing, and coming to new understandings of smart cities and regions, focusing on the six dimensions of sensing, awareness, learning, openness, innovation, and disruption. Using a hybrid case study and correlational approach, people from diverse sectors in a variety of small to medium to large-sized cities in multiple countries (e.g., Canada, United States, Ireland, Greece, Israel, etc.) provide experience-based perspectives on smart cities together with assessments for elements pertaining to each of the six dimensions. The analysis of findings in this work surfaces a rich and interwoven tapestry of patterns from the qualitative data highlighting for example, the importance of emotion/affect, privacy, trust, and data visualizations in influencing and informing the directions of smart cities and regions going forward. Correlational analysis of quantitative data reveals the presence and strength of emerging relationships among elements assessed, shedding light on factors that may serve as starting points for understanding what is contributing to potentials for improving success in smart cities and regions.
Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. The central case study in this book, Henderson-Hopkins, is a PK-8 campus serving as the civic centerpiece of the East Baltimore Development Initiative. This study reflects on the persistent notions of urban renewal and their effectiveness for addressing the needs of disadvantaged neighborhoods and vulnerable communities. Situating the master plan and school project in the history and contemporary landscape of urban development and education debates, this book provides a detailed account of how Henderson-Hopkins sought to address several reformist objectives, such as improvement of the urban context, pedagogic outcomes, and holistic well-being of students. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.
This book presents numerical and experimental research in the field of wind energy exploitation in urban environments. It comprises a selection of the best papers from the international colloquium "Research and Innovation on Wind Energy Exploitation in Urban Environment" (TUrbWind), held in Riva del Garda, Italy in September 2018. The book includes contributions from different research fields in urban wind resources, wind energy conversion systems, and urban integration, mainly focusing on the following topics:* turbine concepts for urban and sub-urban environment; * measuring and modelling wind resource; * rotor aerodynamics, wakes and noise; * design, loads, and supporting structures; * novel shapes and materials; * building concepts for wind energy exploitation; * planning approaches for wind exploitation in urban areas. It is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in the integration of wind energy systems and turbines in urban areas.
Sustainable development within urban and rural areas, transportation systems, logistics, supply chain management, urban health, social services, and architectural design are taken into consideration in the cohesive network models provided in this book. The ideas, methods, and models presented consider city landscapes and quality of life conditions based on mathematical network models and optimization. Interdisciplinary Works from prominent researchers in mathematical modeling, optimization, architecture, engineering, and physics are featured in this volume to promote health and well-being through design. Specific topics include: - Current technology that form the basis of future living in smart cities - Interdisciplinary design and networking of large-scale urban systems - Network communication and route traffic optimization - Carbon dioxide emission reduction - Closed-loop logistics chain management and operation - Modeling the effect urban environments on aging - Health care infrastructure - Urban water system management - Architectural design optimization Graduate students and researchers actively involved in architecture, engineering, building physics, logistics, supply chain management, and mathematical optimization will find the interdisciplinary work presented both informative and inspiring for further research.
The Promise of Planning explores the experience of planning internationally since the global financial crisis, focusing on South Africa. The book is a response to a decade-plus in which state-led planning has re-emerged as a putative means for achieving developmental goals (as indicated in global initiatives such as the New Urban Agenda) and where planning in South Africa has consolidated in terms of its legal and policy basis. However, the return of planning is happening in an inauspicious context, with economic fragilities, technological shifts, political populism, institutional complexities, and more, threatening to upturn the "new promise of planning." The book provides a careful analytical account of planning in South Africa and how and why its promises have been difficult to achieve. Building on the authors’ previous book, Planning and Transformation, the book sheds light on planning as an increasingly complex and diverse governmental practice within a perpetually changing world. It can be used as a resource for planners who must make good on the new promise of planning while navigating the risks and threats of the contemporary world, as well as students and faculty interested in international planning debates and the South African case.
The City in Transgression explores the unacknowledged, neglected, and ill-defined spaces of the built environment and their transition into places of resistance and residence by refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, the homeless, and the disadvantaged. The book draws on urban and spatial theory, socio-economic factors, public space, and architecture to offer an intimate look at how urban sites and infrastructure are transformed into spaces for occupation. Anderson proposes that the varied innovations and adaptations of urban spaces enacted by such marginalized figures - for whom there are no other options - herald a radical new spatial programming of cities. The book explores cities and sites such as Mexico City and London, the Mexican/US border, the Calais Jungle, and Palestinian camps in Beirut and utilizes concepts associated with 'mobility' - such as anarchy, vagrancy, and transgression - alongside photography, 3D modelling, and 2D imagery. From this constellation of materials and analysis, a radical spatial picture of the city in transgression emerges. By focusing on the 'underside of urbanism', The City in Transgression reveals the potential for new spatial networks that can cultivate the potential for self-organization so as to counter the existing dominant urban models of capital and property and to confront some of the major issues facing cities amid an age of global human mobility. This book is valuable reading for those interested in architectural theory, modern history, human geography and mobility, climate change, urban design, and transformation.
Providing adequate, accessible, and affordable housing is a major problem affecting many African countries. Focusing on the West African country of Ghana, Konadu-Agyemang explores the urban housing question in light of current development theories. He concludes that it would be naive to see Ghana's housing crisis primarily as a result of political instability or economic mismanagement. Instead, the author argues that economic and social problems in Africa are products of the structural distortions created by colonialism and the draining of African resources to European countries. The postcolonial continuation of relations of dependency has led to underdevelopment, which is manifested in malformed urban areas characterized by housing shortages, slum environments, and atrophied infrastructures. Konadu-Agyemang concludes that affordable housing in Ghana will only occur with the implementation of policies aimed at decreasing Ghana's dependence on imported building materials and standards. Solutions to the housing crisis in Ghana require remedies to both the internal constraints that impede development and the inequities in the global economy that foster dependency and neo-colonialism.
The 1990s have seen some remarkable changes in geographical information (GI) provision and computer technology that have impacted on many of the activities that constitute planning in all its different forms. However, relatively few texts in the field of geographical information systems (GIS) and planning have been published since Henk Scholten and John Stillwell edited Geographical Information Systems for Urban and Regional Planning in 1990. This volume seeks to redress the balance by showing how GI of various types is being used in urban, physical, environmental, socio-economic and business planning contexts at local, regional and national scales with the assistance of GIS and modelling methods, and how the uses of GI and GI technologies have evolved over the last decade. During this period, a number of meetings took place in Europe in different locations organised initially by European Geographical Information Systems (EGIS, 1990- 94) and more recently by the Joint European Conference and Exhibition (JEC) on Geographical Information (1995-97). These meetings brought together members of the GI community from across the world to discuss GI research and GIS applications. One of the Special Interest Groups associated with the JEC gatherings was that on 'Geographical Information and Planning' and several of the contributions in this book have their origins in papers presented to the group's meetings.
Alesia Montgomery's Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit tells the story of the struggle to shape green redevelopment in Detroit. Cultural workers, envisioning a green city crafted by direct democracy, had begun to draw idealistic young newcomers to Detroit's street art and gardens. Then a billionaire developer and private foundations hired international consultants to redesign downtown and to devise a city plan. Using the justice-speak of cultural workers, these consultants did innovative outreach, but they did not enable democratic deliberation. The Detroit Future City plan won awards, and the new green venues in the gentrified downtown have gotten good press. However, low-income black Detroiters have little ability to shape "greening" as uneven development unfolds and poverty persists. Based on years of fieldwork, Montgomery takes us into the city council chambers, nonprofit offices, gardens, churches, cafes, street parties, and public protests where the future of Detroit was imagined, debated, and dictated. She begins by using statistical data and oral histories to trace the impacts of capital flight, and then she draws on interviews and observations to show how these impacts influence city planning. Hostility between blacks and whites shape the main narrative, yet indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Latinx peoples in Detroit add to the conflict. Montgomery compares Detroit to other historical black urban regimes (HBURs)-U.S. cities that elected their first black mayors soon after the 1960s civil rights movement. Critiques of ecological urbanism in HBURs typically focus on gentrification. In contrast, Montgomery identifies the danger as minoritization: the imposition of "beneficent" governance across gentrified and non-gentrified neighborhoods that treats the black urban poor as children of nature who lack the (mental, material) capacities to decide their future. Scholars and students in the social sciences, as well as general readers with social and environmental justice concerns, will find great value in this research.
Dilemmas of Sustainable Urban Development offers valuable insights into a difficult line of work whose practice inevitably requires a confrontation with fundamental conflicts between divergent goals, and therefore also demands difficult choices and compromises. With contributions from leading academics and expert practitioners, this book provides readers with diverse international case studies which highlight and examine the concrete challenges of practicing sustainable urban development. The examples in this book touch upon all aspects of sustainable urban development work, from City Hall to the local park. All of the cases unfold in their own specific contexts under particular circumstances-but from each one of them there are general lessons that can be used to inform practice. This book is essential reading for anyone who is active as a student, researcher, or practitioner in the field of urban development.
Built environments are complex, emergent, systemic, and require contextual analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals and researchers of the built environment are educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers, practitioners and laypeople in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with numerous environmental/ecological, economic/financial and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a world of continual change. These challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. Combinations of different types of knowledge, knowing in praxis and tacit knowledge are needed. This book presents and illustrates recent innovative contributions with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These transdisciplinary contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that facilitate convergence and concerted action between participants collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. The methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site and virtual simulations, as well as participatory approaches including citizen science, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures.
In today's world, deep learning source codes and a plethora of open access geospatial images are readily available and easily accessible. However, most people are missing the educational tools to make use of this resource. Deep Learning for Remote Sensing Images with Open Source Software is the first practical book to introduce deep learning techniques using free open source tools for processing real world remote sensing images. The approaches detailed in this book are generic and can be adapted to suit many different applications for remote sensing image processing, including landcover mapping, forestry, urban studies, disaster mapping, image restoration, etc. Written with practitioners and students in mind, this book helps link together the theory and practical use of existing tools and data to apply deep learning techniques on remote sensing images and data. Specific Features of this Book: The first book that explains how to apply deep learning techniques to public, free available data (Spot-7 and Sentinel-2 images, OpenStreetMap vector data), using open source software (QGIS, Orfeo ToolBox, TensorFlow) Presents approaches suited for real world images and data targeting large scale processing and GIS applications Introduces state of the art deep learning architecture families that can be applied to remote sensing world, mainly for landcover mapping, but also for generic approaches (e.g. image restoration) Suited for deep learning beginners and readers with some GIS knowledge. No coding knowledge is required to learn practical skills. Includes deep learning techniques through many step by step remote sensing data processing exercises.
Psychological Perspectives on Walking provides a comprehensive overview of the benefits of walking and shows how we can encourage people to walk more based on psychological principles. It examines how walking significantly improves health, positively impacts the environment, contributes to resolving social issues, and boosts the local micro-economy. This pioneering book discusses psychological motivations for walking versus not walking and asserts research-based arguments in favour of walking, including both theoretical considerations and everyday concerns. The book investigates the motivations that can lead to increased walking, advises on how to build walking-conducive habits, and recommends strategies for decision makers for promoting changes that will allow walking to thrive more easily. The authors include success stories and lessons learned from what have become known as 'walkable' cities to show how interventions and initiatives can succeed on a practical basis. This accessible, practical book is essential for urban planners; health specialists; policy makers; traffic experts; psychology, civil engineering, and social sciences students; and experts in the field of sustainable mobility. Psychological Perspectives on Walking will appeal to anyone in the general population in favour of a sustainable and healthy lifestyle.
Psychological Perspectives on Walking provides a comprehensive overview of the benefits of walking and shows how we can encourage people to walk more based on psychological principles. It examines how walking significantly improves health, positively impacts the environment, contributes to resolving social issues, and boosts the local micro-economy. This pioneering book discusses psychological motivations for walking versus not walking and asserts research-based arguments in favour of walking, including both theoretical considerations and everyday concerns. The book investigates the motivations that can lead to increased walking, advises on how to build walking-conducive habits, and recommends strategies for decision makers for promoting changes that will allow walking to thrive more easily. The authors include success stories and lessons learned from what have become known as 'walkable' cities to show how interventions and initiatives can succeed on a practical basis. This accessible, practical book is essential for urban planners; health specialists; policy makers; traffic experts; psychology, civil engineering, and social sciences students; and experts in the field of sustainable mobility. Psychological Perspectives on Walking will appeal to anyone in the general population in favour of a sustainable and healthy lifestyle.
Adopting an interdisciplinary social science approach, this book examines community reactions to wind farms to form a new understanding of what facilitates social acceptance. Based on empirical research, Wind Power and Public Engagement investigates opposition to wind energy and considers the advantages as well as the limits of the co-operative model of wind farm community ownership. Giuseppe Pellegrini-Masini compares the role of co-operative schemes with community benefits schemes in increasing acceptability, and also sheds light on the impact of social factors including pro-environmental attitudes, perceived benefits and costs, place attachment, trust, as well as individuals' resources such as information and income. Five research cases are investigated in England and Scotland, including the first local, community-owned wind farm co-operative in the UK. Critically reviewing existing social research theories, the book offers a new viewpoint, integrating rational choice and environmental attitudinal theories, from which to assess and understand the social acceptability of wind energy. It also highlights new opportunities for raising consensus in communities around locally proposed wind farms. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of renewable energy, energy policy, environmental sociology, environmental psychology, environmental planning and sustainability in general, as well as policymakers.
Community Capacity and Resilience in Latin America addresses the role of communities in building their capacity to increase resiliency and carry out rural development strategies in Latin America. Resiliency in a community sense is associated with an ability to address stress and respond to shock while obtaining participatory engagement in community assessment, planning and outcome. Although the political contexts for community development have changed dramatically in a number of Latin American countries in recent years, there are growing opportunities and examples of communities working together to address common problems and improve collective quality of life. This book links scholarship that highlights community development praxis using new frameworks to understand the potential for community capacity and resiliency. By rejecting old linear models of development, based on technology transfer and diffusion of technology, many communities in Latin America have built capacity of their capital assets to become more resilient and adapt positively to change. This book is an essential resource for academics and practitioners of rural development, demonstrating that there is much we can learn from the skills of self-diagnosis and building on existing assets to enhance community capitals.
This book is a comprehensive history of city planning in post-independence India. It explores how the nature and orientation of city planning have evolved in India's changing sociopolitical context over the past hundred or so years. The book situates India's experience within a historical framework in order to illustrate continuities and disjunctions between the pre- and post-independent Indian laws, policies, and programs for city planning and development. It focuses on the development, scope, and significance of professional planning work in the midst of rapid economic transition, migration, social disparity, and environmental degradation. The volume also highlights the need for inclusive planning processes that can provide clean air, water, and community spaces to large, diverse, and fast growing communities. Detailed and insightful, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students of public administration, civil engineering, architecture, geography, economics, and sociology. It will also be useful for policy makers and professionals working in the areas of town and country planning.
Community Capacity and Resilience in Latin America addresses the role of communities in building their capacity to increase resiliency and carry out rural development strategies in Latin America. Resiliency in a community sense is associated with an ability to address stress and respond to shock while obtaining participatory engagement in community assessment, planning and outcome. Although the political contexts for community development have changed dramatically in a number of Latin American countries in recent years, there are growing opportunities and examples of communities working together to address common problems and improve collective quality of life. This book links scholarship that highlights community development praxis using new frameworks to understand the potential for community capacity and resiliency. By rejecting old linear models of development, based on technology transfer and diffusion of technology, many communities in Latin America have built capacity of their capital assets to become more resilient and adapt positively to change. This book is an essential resource for academics and practitioners of rural development, demonstrating that there is much we can learn from the skills of self-diagnosis and building on existing assets to enhance community capitals.
The role of railways in urban development is the subject of this book. The central aim is to inquire into how especially the development of high-speed rail and light rail links will affect European cities. The analyses are carried out with special attention given to the broader institutional environment of the railway system, including the shift toward privatised railway companies and internationalisation.
With the environment, climate change, and global warming taking center stage in the national debate, the issues seem insurmountable and certainly unsolvable at the local level. Written by Chris Maser, international consultant on forest ecology, sustainable forestry practices, and sustainable development, Social-Environmental Planning: The Design Interface Between Everyforest and Everycity focuses on community based solutions, emphasizing how the heavy lifting of sustainability will always be done inside existing cities and communities. Based on the author's forty years of experience, the book covers the sustainability of the planet and its population when dealing with climate change. The book provides an in-depth understanding of the commonalities of pattern between Everyforest and Everycity. Maser suggests that before changes can be made, society must adapt to the circumstances of global climate change as they already are, and then determine what we can do to stabilize global climate as effectively and quickly as possible. He explores the reciprocal interface between communities and the landscape and how, when this interface is recognized and understood, it can create solutions that work. With this comprehension, people can adapt to the present and begin determining what they can do now to leave the planet a little better for each generation.
Both the number and percentage of people living in urban areas is growing rapidly. Up to half of the world's population is expected to be living in a city by the end of the century and there are over 170 cities in the world with populations over a million. Cities have a huge impact on the local climate and require vast quantities of energy to keep them functioning. The urban environment in turn has a big impact on the performance and needs of buildings. The size, scale and mechanism of these interactions is poorly understood and strategies to mitigate them are rarely implemented. This is the first comprehensive book to address these questions. It arises out of a programme of work (POLISTUDIES) carried out for the Save programme of the European Commission. Chapters describe not only the main problems encountered such as the heat island and canyon effects, but also a range of design solutions that can be adopted both to improve the energy performance and indoor air quality of individual buildings and to look at aspects of urban design that can reduce these climatic effects. The book concludes with some examples of innovative urban bioclimatic buildings. The project was co-ordinated by Professor Mat Santamouris from the University of Athens who is also the editor of the book. Other contributions are from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, ENTPE, Lyons, France and the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
In the decades following the first Earth Day in 1970, a generation has been enlightened about the unspeakable damage done to our planet. Federal, state, and local governments generated laws and regulations to control development and protect the environment. Local governments have developed environmental standards addressing their needs. The result-an ecologically incongruous pattern of land development known as urban sprawl. Local land use planners can have a greater effect on the quality of our environment than all of the federal and state regulators combined. Historically, they have existed on the periphery of land management. The author suggests that federal and state environmental regulators need to incorporate local governments into their environmental protection plans. Ecologically Based Municipal Land Use Planning provides easily understood, nuts and bolts solutions for controlling urban sprawl, emphasizing the integration of federal, state, and local land use plans. The book discusses ecological resources and provides practical solutions that municipal planners can implement immediately. It discusses the most recent scientific data, how to extract what is important, and how to apply it to the local land planning process. The author includes the application of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to problem solving. Despite compelling evidence and sound arguments favoring the implementation of an ecologically sensitive approach to land use planning, municipal planners, in general, remain skeptical. It will take considerably more encouragement and education to win them over completely. Ecologically Based Municipal Land Use Planning makes the case for sound land use policies that will reduce sprawl.
Landscape Ecology - a rapidly growing science - quantifies the ways ecosystems interact. It establishes links between activities in one region and repercussions in another. Landscape Ecology: A Top-Down Approach serves as a general introduction to this emerging area of study. In this book the authors take a "top down" approach. They believe that context is equally as important as content and that an isolated, dismembered landscape fragment loses biodiversity. In contrast, past and current ecosystem studies have not considered the consequences of outside influences. The authors argue that the most detailed mathematical models of biodiversity within a landscape do not suffice to predict the outcome of management practices if the contextual analysis reveals that human impacts outside the landscape contribute to a reserve's ultimate demise. The material presented in this book demonstrates that protecting disconnected vignettes of nature in isolated national parks and reserves, or saving so-called "hot spots" of biodiversity, does not work. The rapid convergence of themes in ecology supports the study of the ecology of landscapes. Advances in this field will come from studies in landscape effects and the mobile organisms whose top down effects create and maintain landscapes. Landscape Ecology: A Top Down Approach supplies the basics for this work.
Bicycle Utopias investigates the future of urban mobilities and post-car societies, arguing that the bicycle can become the nexus around which most human movement will revolve. Drawing on literature on post-car futures (Urry 2007; Dennis and Urry 2009), transition theory (Geels et al. 2012) and utopian studies (Levitas 2010, 2013), this book imagines a slow bicycle system as a necessary means to achieving more sustainable mobility futures. The imagination of a slow bicycle system is done in three ways: Scenario building to anticipate how cycling mobilities will look in the year 2050. A critique of the system of automobility and of fast cycling futures. An investigation of the cycling senses and sociabilities to describe the type of societies that such a slow bicycle system will enable. Bicycle Utopias will appeal to students and scholars in fields such as sociology, mobilities studies, human geography and urban and transport studies. This work may also be of interest to advocates, activists and professionals in the domains of cycling and sustainable mobilities.
Ways of handling climate change vary worldwide. Differences can be observed in the perception of potential threats and opportunities as well as in the appraisal of adequate coping strategies. Collective efforts often fail not because of technical restrictions, but as a result of social and cultural differences between the actors involved. Consequently, there is a need to explore in greater depth those zones of cultural friction which emerge when actors deal with climate change. This book examines how cultural differences in the handling of climate change can be described and explained. The work develops the concept of culture as relational space, elaborates explanatory approaches, and investigates them by surveying more than 800 actors responsible for spatial development of the European coastal regions in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Poland. In doing so, this book engages with debates on cultural globalisation, in which the attachment of culture to place is increasingly being questioned. Adopting the approach of culture as relational space allows possible cultural formations to be examined across diverse fields of application from the local to the global scale. In addition, the book investigates how far different value orientations, beliefs, and identities can explain diverse perceptions of problems and opportunities right up to preferences for climate-mitigation and adaptation measures. Providing comprehensive insights into the diverse zones of cultural friction which scholars and practitioners face when handling climate change locally and globally, this book will be of great interest to those studying climate change, environmental sociology, and sustainable planning. |
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