This book argues that accelerating action toward sustainability for and by cities and their inhabitants can make a huge difference to humanity's endeavor to recover from current crises and build a sustainable future. It sheds light on cutting-edge concepts and actions toward sustainability that can taken by and for cities and with citizens. In this book, author Voula Mega takes the reader on a journey inside and across cities and highlights efforts toward a paradigmatic shift that reconciles human systems with nature. Leadership, education, innovation, trust and citizen empowerment all play a crucial role for the co-invention of a new model that balances human well-being, sustainable prosperity and the future of the planet. Building on robust evidence and inspired by best practices, Human Sustainable Cities offers compelling messages and convincing advice to all stakeholders who are striving to overcome crises, speed up the path toward resilience and preparedness and bounce forward better.

This edited volume provides an essential resource for urban morphology, the study of urban forms and structures, offering a much-needed mathematical perspective. Experts on a variety of mathematical modeling techniques provide new insights into specific aspects of the field, such as street networks, sustainability, and urban growth. The chapters collected here make a clear case for the importance of tools and methods to understand, model, and simulate the formation and evolution of cities. The chapters cover a wide variety of topics in urban morphology, and are conveniently organized by their mathematical principles. The first part covers fractals and focuses on how self-similar structures sort themselves out through competition. This is followed by a section on cellular automata, and includes chapters exploring how they generate fractal forms. Networks are the focus of the third part, which includes street networks and other forms as well. Chapters that examine complexity and its relation to urban structures are in part four.The fifth part introduces a variety of other quantitative models that can be used to study urban morphology. In the book's final section, a series of multidisciplinary commentaries offers readers new ways of looking at the relationship between mathematics and urban forms. Being the first book on this topic, Mathematics of Urban Morphology will be an invaluable resource for applied mathematicians and anyone studying urban morphology. Additionally, anyone who is interested in cities from the angle of economics, sociology, architecture, or geography will also find it useful. "This book provides a useful perspective on the state of the art with respect to urban morphology in general and mathematics as tools and frames to disentangle the ideas that pervade arguments about form and function in particular. There is much to absorb in the pages that follow and there are many pointers to ways in which these ideas can be linked to related theories of cities, urban design and urban policy analysis as well as new movements such as the role of computation in cities and the idea of the smart city. Much food for thought. Read on, digest, enjoy." From the foreword by Michael Batty

This book gathers selected papers from the International Conference on Sustainable Design, Engineering, Management and Sciences (ICSDEMS 2019), held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It highlights recent advances in civil engineering and sustainability, bringing together researchers and professionals to address the latest, most relevant issues in these areas.

This book applies both industrial engineering and computational intelligence to demonstrate intelligent machines that solve real-world problems in various smart environments. The title presents fundamental concepts and the latest advances in Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques and their application to smart environments. Though managers and engineers often use multi-criteria analysis in making complex decisions, many core problems are too difficult to model mathematically or have simply not yet been modelled. In response, as well as AI-based approaches, this book covers various optimization techniques, decision analytics and data science in applying soft computing techniques to a defined set of smart environments, including smart and sustainable cities, disaster response systems and smart campuses. This state-of-the-art book will be essential reading for both undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, practitioners and decision makers interested in advanced MCDM techniques for management and engineering in relation to smart environments.

Cities are undoubted key players in technology creation and adoption for sustainable transitions. This book addresses both the active and passive roles of cities in technology innovation, commercialisation, mass-production and adoption. In particular, it examines elements of three socio-technical systems, energy, transport and healthcare. The authors investigate cities in Europe, Asia and North America, providing an in depth understanding of the differences in leadership roles that cities adopt across the globe. The book breaks new ground in the analysis of topical issues such as local '?cradle?' conditions, incentive schemes, niche-development, living labs, impact bonds, grass-roots intermediation and adaptive policy making. Researchers and students involved in the urban studies, socio-technical transitions and sustainability would greatly benefit from reading this book. The variety of practical examples also makes this book an important tool for city policy makers, as well as public policy and public sector scholars. Contributors include: J.A. Annema, U. Dewald, M. Dignum, S. Faber, A. Holbrook, J.A. Holbrook, S. Konsti-Laakso, F. Kuiperi, H. Melkas, R. Nejabat, W. Ravesteijn, V. Scholten, L. Song, P. Stek, M. Taheri, M.S. van Geenhuizen, B. van Hulst, B. Wixted, Q. Ye

Mounting scientific evidence generated over the past decade highlights the significant role of our cities' built environments in shaping our health and well-being. In this book, the authors conceptualize the 'urban health niche' as a novel approach to public health and healthy-city planning that integrates the diverse and multi-level health determinants present in a city system.The authors trace the origins of public health and city planning, drawing upon the shifting paradigms of epidemiology. Advanced network analysis techniques are employed to examine multi-scale associations between individual-level health outcomes and built environment features such as density, land-use mix and road network configuration. Healthy Cities will prove a fascinating read for an interdisciplinary body of scholars, practitioners and policy makers within the domains of public policy, regional and urban studies, urban planning, spatial epidemiology, health geography, sociology, public health and psychology.

Smart Cities: Issues and Challenges: Mapping Political, Social and Economic Risks and Threats serves as a primer on smart cities, providing readers with no prior knowledge on smart cities with an understanding of the current smart cities debates. Gathering cutting-edge research and insights from academics, practitioners and policymakers around the globe, it identifies and discusses the nascent threats and challenges contemporary urban areas face, highlighting the drivers and ways of navigating these issues in an effective manner. Uniquely providing a blend of conceptual academic analysis with empirical insights, the book produces policy recommendations that boost urban sustainability and resilience.

Understanding Soils in Urban Environments is a concise book explaining how urban soils develop, change and erode. Soils provide the foundation for buildings and infrastructure, and the medium for plant growth in fields, parks and gardens. They can act as a sink for waste, and can be contaminated in urban areas by heavy metals, organic chemicals and other contaminants. Soil properties such as water retention, salinity and acidity can cause environmental and structural problems for buildings and other engineering works. This text recognises and draws attention to the particular nature of soils in urban environments and discusses their distinctive management needs. Since the first edition was published in 2011, it has been used across a wide range of disciplines, many of which require an understanding of urban soil and specific soil properties that cause environmental concern. Urban soils are now recognised as much more important now than they were ten years ago, when they were seen as a poor relation to agriculture. The need for better understanding of all aspects of this topic has become evident especially at conferences in the last 5 years in Australia and internationally, where urban soils are now included as specific sections, not just as subsets such as contamination. This new edition updates and expands on the original text, including a specific chapter on the use of manufactured soil for rehabilitation and recreation, and additional case studies in other chapters, particularly contamination. The text is updated throughout to address the increasing importance of soil health for seed banks and parklands, and its implications for planning developments, the legal determination of bioregions, and addressing environmental issues that can arise from mismanagement of urban soils.

* One of the first critiques of participatory design processes that are currently the fashion in design and business * highlights political, social and methodological obstacles when designers turn to design thinking, participation and "living labs" * uses global examples to introduce a more critical and post-colonial perspective on participation and social innovation throughout the book

This book is an empirically rich case-study of what is currently the most popular alternative-fuel vehicle in the history of motorization - the electric two-wheeler (e-bike). The book provides sociological insights into e-bike mobility in China and discusses politics, social practices and larger issues of mobility transition in urban China. Taking an accessible approach to the subject, the book identifies the main sociospatial conflicts regarding the use of e-bikes and discusses why electric two-wheeler mobility is important for the future of urban China and urban transportation globally. This book will be an invaluable read for urban geographers and transportation researchers, but also for academics and general readers interested in Chinese Studies, specifically in the area of urban mobility in China.

As the world continues to see an expansion of technological innovations, highly populated areas are starting to adopt sustainable solutions to become more energy efficient. The concept of circular cities is a new economic model that reconfigures products and services in such ways as to eliminate the issues of waste and harmful influences and uses alternative energy resources and materials. Many of these principles are currently being implemented in various regions' policies; however, research is still lacking on the implementation of circular economics in urban areas. Developing and Designing Circular Cities: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods, framework, and implementation of a circular economy within urbanized areas. This book analyzes the various disciplines of circularity within modern cities while also comparing past and future approaches to urban development. While highlighting topics including sustainable development, renewable energy systems, and urban planning, this book is ideally designed for architects, urban planners, contractors, investors, government officials, civil engineers, educators, academicians, researchers, and students.

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.

Civil Engineering and Urban Research collects papers resulting from the conference on Civil, Architecture and Urban Engineering (ICCAUE 2022), Xining, China, 24-26 June, 2022. The primary goal is to promote research and developmental activities in civil engineering, architecture and urban research. Moreover, it aims to promote scientific information interchange between scholars from the top universities, business associations, research centers and high-tech enterprises working all around the world. The conference conducts in-depth exchanges and discussions on relevant topics such as civil engineering and architecture, aiming to provide an academic and technical communication platform for scholars and engineers engaged in scientific research and engineering practice in the field of urban engineering, civil engineering and architecture design. By sharing the research status of scientific research achievements and cutting-edge technologies, it helps scholars and engineers all over the world comprehend the academic development trend and broaden research ideas. So as to strengthen international academic research, academic topics exchange and discussion, and promote the industrialization cooperation of academic achievements.

This book explores how cities are shaped by the lived experiences of inhabitants and examines the ways they develop strategies to cope with daily and unexpected challenges. It argues that migration, livelihood, and public health challenges result from inadequacies in the hard city-urban assets, such as land, infrastructure and housing, and asserts that these challenges and escalating vulnerabilities are best negotiated using the soft city-social capital and community networks. In so doing, the authors criticise a singular knowledge system and argue for a granular, nuanced understanding of cities-of the interrelations between people in places, everyday urbanisms, social relationships, cultural practices and histories. The volume presents perspectives from the Global South and the Global North, and engages with city-specific cases from Africa, India and Europe for a deeper understanding of resilience. Part of the Urban Futures series, it will be of great interest to students and researchers of urban studies, urban planning, urban management, architecture, urban sociology, urban design, ecology, conservation, and urban sustainability. It will also be useful for urbanists, architects, urban sociologists, city and town planners and those interested in a deeper understanding of the contemporary and future city.

This book examines the interplay between rural places and the competing narratives of globalization and nationalism. Through case studies from Croatia, Belgium, Australia, the USA, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Italy and Spain, this volume highlights the contemporary status of rural change through the lens of sustainability and set within current competing narratives of globalization and economic nationalism. The multiplicity of roles that rural communities play in economic and social systems are often overlooked in conversations about globalization and economic nationalism. Yet rural communities, economies and landscapes are closely tied to global industries, migrant flows and markets, while simultaneously subject to nationalist economic policies and strategies. The chapters in this book seek to elucidate the nuanced ties between people and industries that are at once intensely local and simultaneously tied to regional and global processes. The volume challenges us to critically examine oversimplified messaging of highly complex systems and provides insights into processes of change at local scales across major global regions. Sustaining Rural Systems will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and scholars in the areas of rural sociology, human geography and development studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Geographical Review.

This book on urban water bodies, catchment areas and drainage pattern is set against the backdrop of the unprecedented heavy rainfall that severely deluged metropolitan cities and other parts of India in recent years. It discusses how the processes and implementation of colonial urban development policies and projects have radically transformed the water bodies and their catchment areas - traditional water holding systems of Varanasi city. In this imperative colonial process, through the case study of Varanasi, the book mainly engages with the reasons behind the elimination of the temple tanks and ponds after the annexation of Varanasi by the British from 1775 till 1947. The book investigates the colonial notion of 'dry city', and how this notion crafted the process of separating land and water bodies, which arguably resulted in the reclamation and draining of water bodies, and also gave rise to water pollution. Additionally, the book analyzes the elimination of water bodies and loss of catchment areas through the ongoing processes of restoring the ancient city's natural and cultural heritage. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

This book presents recent innovative trends in land, water and energy management in Vietnam. Presenting the main projects and outcomes of a close collaboration between Italian and Vietnamese researchers in the last three years, the book is divided into three main sections: environment, climate change and land management in Vietnam; energy for Vietnam; and cities and utilities in Vietnam. The first section focuses on water systems, including rivers and seacoasts, and on new growing methods for more sustainable agriculture. The second section addresses energy and wastewater. The country's rapid growth is a major challenge in terms of reinforcing the electrical infrastructures, and as such this section offers an overview of the government's planned measures and their impact on the Vietnamese power system. The third section highlights cities and utilities in the context of increasing urbanization, exploring the urban morphology of the Vietnamese metropolis, particularly Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

This book explores the contributions of psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical perspectives to the design of contemporary cities. Pursuing an innovative and multidisciplinary approach, it addresses the need to re-launch knowledge and creativity as major cultural and institutional bases of human communities. Dwelling is a form of knowledge and re-invention of reality that involves both the tangible dimension of physical places and their mental representation. Findings in the neuroscientific field are increasingly opening stimulating perspectives on the design of spaces, and highlight how our ability to understand other people is strongly related to our corporeity. The first part of the book focuses on the contributions of various disciplines that deal with the spatial dimension, and explores the dovetailing roles that science and art can play from a multidisciplinary perspective. In turn, the second part formulates proposals on how to promote greater integration between the aesthetic and cultural dimension in spatial design. Given its scope, the book will benefit all scholars, academics and practitioners who are involved in the process of planning, designing and building places, and will foster an international exchange of research, case studies, and theoretical reflections to confront the challenges of designing conscious places and enable the development of communities.

This book uncovers, explores and analyses the cultural and social factors and values that lie behind waste making, recycling and disposal in the Asia Pacific region, where impressive economic growth has led to significant increases in production, consumption and concomitant waste production. This volume demonstrates the immense scope of waste as a multi-sectoral phenomenon, covering discussions on food, menstrual products, sewage, electronics, scrap, nuclear waste, plastics, and even entire villages as they are submerged underwater by dam building, considered expendable in favour of economic growth. It discusses the wide range of approaches and contexts through which people interact with waste, including socio-economic analysis, participatory observation, laboratory science, art, video, installations, literature and photography. Case studies focusing on India, China and Japan, in addition to other regional examples, demonstrate the ubiquity of waste, materially and geographically. It examines the duality of waste management, fostering community building while simultaneously excluding marginalised groups; how it can be linked to efforts creating circular economies, to then reappear in oceanic garbage patches; or technical waste repurposed for high-tech laboratory research before being discarded once again. This timely and wide-ranging collection of essays will be an important read for scholars, researchers and students in sustainability, development studies, discard studies, and social and cultural history, particularly focusing on countries in the Asia-Pacific.

Julie Ren investigates the motivations and practices of making art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research, beyond its significance as a critical intervention. Across vastly different contexts, where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, she innovatively explores the ways that art spaces employ creative capital to sustain themselves in a competitive urban landscape. She shows how these art spaces are embedded within a politics of aspiration and demonstrates that aspiration is an important lens through which to understand the nature of, and possibilities for, urban change.

This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a fresh, accessible and case-based discussion on the emergence of digitally-enabled social innovation practices in Europe that are redesigning the urban space and challenging the consolidated urban governance processes. By adopting a critical geography perspective, this ground-breaking analysis of digital social innovation provides the reader with an accessible overview of the way in which urban reproductive processes mobilise the physical and the virtual dimensions of the city and generate distinctive spatial configurations. Together with novel urban narratives and socio-technical imaginaries, these support the existing geometries of power or construct new ones. The author clearly describes contemporary cities as the new battlegrounds for controlling the digital sphere, shaped by the interplay between digital capitalism and resistance movements. In light of grassroots initiatives advanced by cyber-activists, e-makers and hackers, the book unveils the socio-political and cultural underpinnings of the revolution produced by the digital social innovations in the city and the socio-technological regimes supporting them. This author successfully sheds new critical light on traditional innovation studies exploring the debate on digital innovation through the lens of social and cultural geography providing an invaluable reference for those working in this field.

Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Property provides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.

Depopulation, Deindustrialisation and Disasters are three of the biggest problems facing Japan today. This book discusses how sustainable communities are being created in Japan in an attempt to overcome the threat of the triple Ds . It provides an overview of how each of these three core issues endangers the sustainability of local communities especially, but also discusses how they might also provide an opportunity to replace outdated paradigms, rooted in expansion and competition, with a new way forward on a global scale. The authors explore how the Japanese government has followed the worldwide trend of implementing neo-liberal policies in response to globalisation and how these policies have resulted in a mass exodus into larger cities such as Tokyo, leaving local communities more vulnerable to socio-economic threats. The authors highlight non-metropolitan areas facing the 'triple D' threat and introduce several case studies on how these are working towards achieving a more sustainable future. Written by members of the LORC (Research Centre for the Local Public Human Resources and Policy Development, Ryukoku University) this collection will be invaluable to scholars across the social and political sciences and to those interested in how innovative policy making can positively influence sustainable development.

This book highlights various designs for urban green spaces and their functions. It provides an interesting meeting point between Asian, European and North America specialists (researchers, planners, landscape architects) studying urban biodiversity; urban biodiversity and green space; relations between people and biodiversity. The most important feature of this book is the unique point of view from each contributor towards "the relationship between nature and people in urban areas", in the context of the ecosystem and biodiversity in urban areas and how to manage them. All chapters explore and consider the relationship between humans and nature in cities, a subject which is taking on increasing importance as new cities are conceptualized and planned. These discussion and examples would be useful for urban ecology researchers, biologists, city planners, government staff working in city planning, architects, landscape architects, and university instructors. This book can also be used as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate city planning, architecture or landscape architecture courses.

Untangling Smart Cities: From Utopian Dreams to Innovation Systems for a Technology-Enabled Urban Sustainability helps all key stakeholders understand the complex and often conflicting nature of smart city research, offering valuable insights for designing and implementing strategies to improve the smart city decision-making processes. The book drives the reader to a better theoretical and practical comprehension of smart city development, beginning with a thorough and systematic analysis of the research literature published to date. It addition, it provides an in-depth understanding of the entire smart city knowledge domain, revealing a deeply rooted division in its cognitive-epistemological structure as identified by bibliometric insights. Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between theory and practice using case study research and empirical evidence drawn from cities considered leaders in innovative smart city practices.