As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses several performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines. -- .

Focusing on different tools, platforms, and techniques, Blockchain and the Smart City: Infrastructure and Implementation uses case studies from around the world to examine blockchain deployment in diverse smart city applications. The book begins by examining the fundamental theories and concepts of blockchain. It looks at key smart cities' domains such as banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain management. It examines Using case studies for each domain, the book looks at payment mechanisms, fog/edge computing, green computing, and algorithms and consensus mechanisms for smart cities implementation. It looks at tools such as Hyperledger, Etherium, Corda, IBM Blockchain, Hydrachain, as well as policies and regulatory standards, applications, solutions, and methodologies. While exploring future blockchain ecosystems for smart and sustainable city life, the book concludes with the research challenges and opportunities academics, researchers, and companies in implementing blockchain applications.

The history of urbanization was inseparably connected with the exploitation of the environment and the subjugation of rivers. Today we experience the effects of this expansion in the form of escalating water problems. The book outlines the processes of transformation of anthropogenic, natural and waterborne structures in urban environment, which were presented in three historical phases: the period of Respect, Conquest and Return. River-friendly cities require integrated water management in entire catchments from the source to the recipient. The key to the success of the Return strategy is the recovery of space for greenery and water, responsible spatial planning, circular economy and rainwater management as well as continuous raising of awareness of the whole society.

--International case studies from the US, UK, Germany, Taiwan, Uganda, Italy, and Canada --As small communities, especially in rural areas, continue to lose population it will be even more important for them to rely on innovative financing approaches to retain quality of life. --Reviews the experiences in the countries identified along with approaches used to glean the common elements that make them successful and viable

Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanisation. Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises, and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures' past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.

This book focuses on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urban milieu in contemporary cities. Filled with reflections based on interviews with a diverse range of creative actors in various local neighborhoods in Tokyo, it offers a rare glimpse into the complex set of elements that provide long-term, physical, and sociocultural support to urban creativity. Ursic and Imai highlight the interplay between physical and soft (social) factors in the process of place-making and explore how a city's creativity is influenced by financial support and accessible infrastructure, as well as the sets of informal networks, services, and tacit, locally embedded knowledge that provide the basic layers of stimuli needed for creativity to fully develop. The authors show how the future development of creativity and the overall development of a city depend not only on the (top-down) planning strategies of formal authorities, but also on the appropriate (bottom-up) inclusion of heterogeneous elements that are provided and embedded within the small, hidden context of city spaces.

'Chinatowns' are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of 'the East' in 'the West'. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference. By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an 'other' space - whether negative or positive - have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney's Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a place in Sydney's Chinatown: that of an interconnected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.

This open access book traces the development of landscapes along the 414-kilometer China-Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and which is due for completion at the end of 2021. Written from the perspective of landscape architecture and intended for planners and related professionals engaged in the development and conservation of these landscapes, this book provides history, planning pedagogy and interdisciplinary framing for working alongside the often-opaque planning, design and implementation processes of large-scale infrastructure. It complicates simplistic notions of development and urbanization frequently reproduced in the Laos-China frontier region. Many of the projects and sites investigated in this book are recent "firsts" in Laos: Laos's first wildlife sanctuary for trafficked endangered species, its first botanical garden and its first planting plan for a community forest. Most often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development, the planning and design professions, including landscape architecture, have little dialogue with either the mainstream natural sciences or critical social sciences that form the discourse of projects in Laos and comparable contexts. Covering diverse conceptions and issues of development, including cultural and scientific knowledge exchanges between Laos and China, nature tourism, connectivity and new town planning, this book also features nine planning proposals for Laos generated through this research initiative since the railway's groundbreaking in 2016. Each proposal promotes a wider "landscape approach" to development and deploys landscape architecture's spatial and ecological acumen to synthesize critical development studies with the planner's capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground. Ultimately, this book advocates the cautious engagement of the professionally oriented built-environment disciplines, such as regional planning, civil engineering and landscape architecture, with the landscapes of development institutions and environmental NGOs.

Since the earliest days of civilization, streets have played an important role in shaping society - but what is a street? Is it a living ecosystem, a public space, a social space, an economic space or a combination of these? The focus on automotive travel over the past century has changed the role of streets in cities. This has degraded the quality of urban life and contributed to public health issues. This book offers a unique look at streets as locations that can evolve to support the economic, social, cultural and natural aspects of cities. Using modern urban design examples, it challenges readers to focus not only on the livability and travel benefits of roads, but on how the power of streets can be harnessed. In so doing, it shapes more dynamic spaces for walking, biking and living, and aims to stimulate urban vitality and community regeneration, encouraging policymakers and individuals to make changes in their own communities.

The fourth edition of Housing Policy in the United States refreshes its classic, foundational coverage of the field with new data, analysis, and comparative focus. This landmark volume offers a broad overview that synthesizes a wide range of material to highlight the significant problems, concepts, programs and debates that all defi ne the aims, challenges, and milestones within and involving housing policy. Expanded discussion in this edition centers on state and local activity to produce and preserve affordable housing, the impact and the implications of reduced fi nancial incentives for homeowners. Other features of this new edition include: * Analysis of the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on housing- related tax expenditures; * Review of the state of fair housing programs in the wake of the Trump Administration's rollback of several key programs and policies; * Cross- examination of U.S. housing policy and conditions in an international context. Featuring the latest available data on housing patterns and conditions, this is an excellent companion for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in urban studies, urban planning, sociology and social policy, and housing policy.

With cities striving to meet sustainable development goals, circular urban systems are gaining momentum, especially in Europe. This research-based book defines the circular city and circular development. It explains the shift in focus from a purely economic concept, which promotes circular business models in cities, to one that explores a new approach to urban development. This approach offers huge opportunities and addresses important sustainability issues: resource consumption and waste; climate change; the health of urban populations; social inequalities and the creation of sustainable urban economies. It examines the different approaches to circular development, drawing on research conducted in four European cities: Amsterdam, London, Paris and Stockholm. It explores different development pathways and levers for a circular urban transformation. It highlights the benefits of adopting a circular approach to development in cities, but acknowledges that these benefits are not shared equally across society. Finally, it focuses on the challenges to implementing circular development faced by urban actors. This ground-breaking book will be essential reading to scholars, students, practitioners and policymakers interested in the circular economy, urban sustainability, urban ecology, urban planning, urban regeneration, urban resilience, adaptive cities and regenerative cities.

Why should the public participate in planning? And who are the stakeholders who are required to participate in the planning process? This guide assesses public and stakeholder participation in the planning process, which is a statutory requirement across the entire scope and scale of planning activities in many global contexts. It provides a historical overview of participation and outlines how this has evolved over time. It then outlines a series of key issues for the contemporary planning professional in terms of their approach to public and stakeholder participation, particularly in light of alterations in landscapes of governance and recent social, political and technological developments. Illustrated with mostly UK and European case studies, but also drawing insights from further afield, the book also provides a framework for critiquing contemporary participation, including an assessment of the pitfalls, obstacles and unintended consequences of participation efforts. As such, it identifies key principles for participation and asks critical questions for its assessment.

Energy Storage in Energy Markets reviews the modeling, design, analysis, optimization and impact of energy storage systems in energy markets in a way that is ideal for an audience of researchers and practitioners. The book provides deep insights on potential benefits and revenues, economic evaluation, investment challenges, risk analysis, technical requirements, and the impacts of energy storage integration. Heavily referenced and easily accessible to policymakers, developers, engineer, researchers and students alike, this comprehensive resource aims to fill the gap in the role of energy storage in pool/local energy/ancillary service markets and other multi-market commerce. Chapters elaborate on energy market fundamentals, operations, energy storage fundamentals, components, and the role and impact of storage systems on energy systems from different aspects, such as environmental, technical and economics, the role of storage devices in uncertainty handling in energy systems and their contributions in resiliency and reliability improvement.

This book sets out some positive directions to move forward including government policy and regulatory options, an innovative GRID (Greening, Regenerative, Improvement Districts) scheme that can assist with funding and management, and the first steps towards an innovative carbon credit scheme for the built environment. Decarbonising cities is a global agenda with huge significance for the future of urban civilisation. Global demonstrations have shown that technology and design issues are largely solved. However, the mainstreaming of low carbon urban development, particularly at the precinct scale, currently lacks sufficient: standards for measuring carbon covering operational, embodied and transport emissions; assessment and decision-making tools to assist in design options; certifying processes for carbon neutrality within the built environment; and accreditation processes for enabling carbon credits to be generated from precinct-wide urban development. Numerous barriers are currently hindering greater adoption of high performance, low carbon developments, many of which relate to implementation and governance. How to enable and manage precinct-scale renewables and other low carbon technologies within an urban setting is a particular challenge.

Now that the Earth has reached the limits of its biophysical carrying capacity, we have to change technologies, social practices and social norms relating to material production and consumption to ensure that we do not further jeopardize the functioning of our planet's life support systems. Through research, education and civic engagement, universities have a pivotal role to play in this transition. This timely book explores how universities are establishing living laboratories for sustainable development, and examines the communication networks and knowledge infrastructures that underpin impact both on and beyond the campus. The expert contributors present case studies of living laboratories being built in leading universities across four continents. Their aim is to cultivate the transition to sustainable development by actively fostering social and technological change to improve use of natural resources and reduce pollution. They are designed to link research, education and practice and to integrate knowledge across disciplines to develop more socially robust approaches to improving sustainability. Directing attention to what enables and constrains learning in communities of multiple and very diverse stakeholders in such laboratories can contribute to a better general understanding of factors influencing the chance of success (or failure), and the institutional arrangements, norms and values that accompany it. Focussing on social learning processes to drive societal change for sustainable development, this fascinating book will prove an invaluable read for academics, researchers, students and policy makers in the fields of higher education, regional and urban studies, public policy and the environment, and development studies. Contributors: B. Baleti , T. Becker, T. Berkhout, A. Campbell, A. Cayuela, S. Chen, M. Dalbro, J. Evans, M. Hesse, J. Holmberg, M. Holme Samsoe, Y. Hua, J.-H. Kain, A. Kildahl, H. Komatsu, A. Koenig, N. Kurata, S. Liao, U. Lundgren, B. Meehan, E. Omrcen, T. Ozasa, M. Polk, C. Powell, J. Robinson, H. Tan, T. Ueno

Smart Cities and the UN's SDGs explores how smart cities initiatives intersect with the global goal of making urbanization inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Topics explored include digital governance, e-democracy, health care access, public-private partnerships, well-being, and more. Examining smart cities concepts, tools, strategies, and obstacles and their applicability to sustainability, the book exposes key structural problems that cities face and how the imperative of sustainability can bypass them. It shows how smart city technological innovation can boost citizens' well-being, serving as a key reference for those seeking to make sense of the issues and challenges of smart cities and SDGs.

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.

This book discusses population growth and the resultant problems, and highlights the need for immediate action to develop a set of planned satellite towns around Indian megacities to reduce their population densities and activity concentrations. It addresses problems like unplanned spatial expansion, over-concentration of populations, unmanageable situations in industrial growth, and poor traffic management, concluding that only megacities and their satellites, when planned properly, can together mitigate the urgent problem of urban concentration in and around the megacities. Identifying the general problems, the book develops a quantitative and spatially fitting regional allocation model of population and economic activities. It also offers a policy-based planned program of development for the selected megacities in India along with their satellites and fringe areas to ensure a healthy, balanced and prospective urban scenario for India in the coming decades.

This book provides new information to understand the relationship between urban development and environmental change to the reader. How to create a sustainable and livable urban environment and realize the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN) is one of the biggest challenges in this century, even in the next centuries. The covered subject areas of this book aim at finding a way to push SDGs forward by collecting the related knowledge between urban development and its environmental implication. Specifically, the book focuses on UN SDGs 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), and 13 (climate action). Regarding the SDGs 9, this book assesses urban population mobility, urban ecosystem services, and green infrastructure to address climate change in cities. Regarding the SDGs 11, this book explores the sustainability of urban landscape change associated with urbanization based on a multi-scale perspective. Regarding the SDGs 13, this book explores the issues affecting the development of healthy cities in the context of climate change and possible ways to address them. This book focuses on newer fields related to various forms of urbanization and urban climate. Under different urbanization and development scenarios, the city and built environment are facing new challenges and become a major concern. Better understandings of related physical laws and sustainable technologies are badly needed. This book is a good reference to urban planners, city officials, citizens who are concerned about the city environment, and policymakers, as well as students studying urban structure and environment.

--The book could be used at undergraduate and postgraduate levels on urban and regional planning programmes, but could also feature in some urban geography programmes and international studies. --The book would have widespread international appeal reflecting its focus on the Commonwealth and its authorship by world renown academics, thought leaders and distinguished practitioners from 9 countries.

Planning theory and practice has become more conscious in recent times of the need to cater for a diverse range of needs and preferences. But there has been less clarity about what goals and objectives should inform planning for such diversity. In this important new book Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson identify three distinct working principles of planning for diversity: redistribution, recognition and encounter. Each principle is the subject of a pair of chapters. The first explaining the principle and the second showcasing and comparing efforts to shape cities according to it, drawing on relevant examples from around the world. Planning for Diversity is the ideal introduction to the issues that surround diversity and planning and provides a stimulating new line of advance for reducing inequality and working towards 'just diversity' in cities. RUTH FINCHER is Professor of Geography at the University of Melbourne, Australia KURT IVESON is Lecturer in Urban Geography at the University of Sydney, Australia

The book is a collection of essays exploring the potential of multimedia to enrich and transform the planning field. By multimedia the authors refer to a broad range of new information and communication technologies (from film and video to digital ethnography and the internet), which are opening up new possibilities in planning practices, processes, pedagogy and research. The authors document the ways in which these ICTs can expand the language of planning and the creativity of planners; can evoke the lived experience (the spirit, memories, desires) of our 21st century mongrel cities by engaging with stories and storytelling; and can democratise planning practices.

The text is epistemologically radical, in presenting an argument for the importance of "multiple languages" (ways of knowing) in the planning field, and making the connection between this epistemology and the almost infinite potential of Multimedia to provide varied tools to accomplish this transformation, displacing the supremacy of the rational, linear and hierarchical with more open, playful and imaginative approaches. Each of the authors brings practical experience with different forms of Multimedia use and reflects on the different potentialities offered by Multimedia for critical intervention in urban and regional issues, and the power dynamics embedded in such interventions.

This book examines interreligious dialogue from a European perspective. It features detailed case studies analysed from different disciplinary perspectives. These studies consider such activities as face-to-face discussion groups, public meetings, civic consultations with members of faith groups, and community action projects that bring together people from different faiths. Overall, the work reports on five years of qualitative empirical research gathered from different urban sites across four European cities (Hamburg, London, Stockholm, Oslo). It includes a comparative element which connects distinctive German, Scandinavian, and English experiences of the shared challenge of religious plurality. The contributors look at the issue through social, material, and ideological dimensions. They explore the following questions: Is interreligious dialogue the producer or product of social capital? What and how are different meanings produced and contested in places of interreligious activity? What is the function of religious thinking in different forms of interreligious activity? Their answers present a detailed analysis of the variety of practices on the ground. A firm empirical foundation supports their conclusions. Readers will learn about the changing nature of urban life through increasing pluralisation and the importance of interreligious relations in the current socio-political context. They will also gain a better understanding of the conditions, processes, function, and impact of interreligious engagement in community relations, public policy, urban planning, and practical theology.

The status quo doesn't work for millions of Americans, and the consequences of millions of failures are expensive for everyone else. There has to be a better, fairer, and more cost-effective way of helping people achieve success. That is what this book is all about. The United States now spends trillions of dollars on chronic disease, incarceration, educational failures, and lost productivity-among the many problems of the current system. Instead, this book argues for better, more targeted spending that could guarantee an opportunity-rich childhood for all. The "guardrails" of the title are the aspects of a well-functioning neighborhood that help children become thriving adults: good schools, well-funded libraries, safe streets and public spaces, quality health care, churches and other spiritual homes, and transportation and other public services. "Airbags" are timely interventions at the individual level that help avert lasting damage from bad events. Examples include drug treatment or psychological counseling for troubled young people. The United States can afford both better guardrails and airbags for kids to help them become healthy and productive adults who will be effective parents for the next generation. This book advocates a smarter social safety net that will catch kids heading in the wrong direction before they are harmed, and society will pay for those upstream investments and reap the benefits of healthier and more productive generations to come.

Combining elements of sustainable and resilient cities agendas, together with those from social justice studies, and incorporating concerns about good governance, transparency and accountability, the book presents a coherent conceptual framework for the ethical city, in which to embed existing and new activities within cities so as to guide local action. The authors' observations are derived from city-specific surveys and urban case studies. These reveal how progressive cities are promoting a diverse range of ethically informed approaches to urbanism, such as community wealth building, basic income initiatives, participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies. The text argues that the ethical city is a logical next step for critical urbanism in the era of late capitalism, characterised by divisive politics, burgeoning inequality, widespread technology-induced disruptions to every aspect of modern life and existential threats posed by climate change, sustainability imperatives and pandemics. Engaging with their communities in meaningful ways and promoting positive transformative change, ethical cities are well placed to deliver liveable and sustainable places for all, rather than only for wealthy elites. Likewise, the aftermath of shocks such as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic reveals that cities that are not purposeful in addressing inequalities, social problems, unsustainability and corruption face deepening difficulties. Readers from across physical and social sciences, humanities and arts, as well as across policy, business and civil society, will find that the application of ethical principles is key to the pursuit of socially inclusive urban futures and the potential for cities and their communities to emerge from or, at least, ameliorate a diverse range of local, national and global challenges.