This book explores the issues of transformation phenomena of the urban dimension (regionalization processes) that traditional scientific literature fails to describe appropriately. So far, scholars have adopted a widespread dominant perspective that proved unable to grasp the essence of post-modern complexities that urban spaces imply. The book provides a taxonomy, in order to describe the rules of these new and peculiar cities, by using the living dimension as a device for the epistemological breaking down of traditional socio-spatial analyses. After a thorough theoretical introduction, it describes two Sicilian case studies that prove particularly relevant to the construction of a new, alternative urban regionalization theory. These two areas, Palermo and South-Eastern Sicily, are described through several aspects, such as the role of migrants and migrations in defining urban regionalization, the power of fiction and the new urban forms that are slowly emerging in Sicily. Overall, this book provides a refreshing view of what Sicily has been and is becoming, by deconstructing most of its cliches and suggesting theoretical perspectives grounded in both quantitative and qualitative analyses.

This book brings readers the first scientific publication, using a mixed-method approach, on the internal migration dynamics regarding disease ecologies of informality and the interactions between social capital, lifestyles, health literacy, and health outcomes in the context of informal settlements in two developing countries - Ghana and Uganda. Through the prism of the concepts of place and scale, the book demonstrates the myriad of ways by which place or context directly and indirectly influence migrant's health knowledge, literacy, and outcomes in poor urban slums. Readers will learn about the multi-faceted linkages between social capital, acculturation, and health in places of deprivation via quantitative methods (e.g. surveys) and qualitative methods such as focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, concept mapping, and body health mapping. Chapters 1-2 provide an overview of internal migration into urban slums of Ghana and Uganda, and discuss the intersections between migration, social capital, and health in a global context. Chapters 3-7 address disease patterns, environmental risks to health, health literacy of migrants, social capital and acculturation, and social capital and health. The book will be of interest to professors and students, as well as policy makers in low to middle income countries for planning targeted interventions.

This open access book reframes sustainable energy transitions as being a matter of resolving accountability crises. It demonstrates how the empirical study of several practices of legitimation can analytically deconstruct energy transitions, and presents a typology of these practices to help determine whether energy transitions contribute to sustainability. The real-world challenge of climate change requires sustainable energy transitions. This presents a crisis of accountability legitimated through situated practices in a wide range of cases including: solar energy transitions in Portugal, urban energy transitions in Germany, forestland conflicts in Indonesia, urban carbon emission targets in Norway, transport electrification in the Nordic region, and biodiversity conservation and energy extraction in the USA. By synthesising these cases, chapters identify various dimensions wherein practices of legitimation construct specific accountability relations. This book deftly illustrates the value of an analytical approach focused on accountable governance to enable sustainable energy transitions. It will be of great use to both academics and practitioners working in the field of energy transitions.

Explorer-naturalists Robert Brown and Mungo Park played a pivotal role in the development of natural history and exploration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This work is a fresh examination of the lives and careers of Brown and Park and their impact on natural history and exploration. Brown and Park were part of a group of intrepid naturalists who brought back some of the flora and fauna they encountered, drawings of what they observed, and most importantly, their ideas. The educated public back home was able to gain an understanding of the diversity in nature. This eventually led to the development of new ways of regarding the natural world and the eventual development of a coherent theory of organic evolution. This book considers these naturalists, Brown, Park, and their contemporaries, from the perspective of the Scottish Enlightenment. Brown's investigations in natural history created a fertile environment for breakthroughs in taxonomy, cytology, and eventually evolution. Brown's pioneering work in plant taxonomy allowed biologists to look at the animal and plant kingdoms differently. Park's adventures stimulated significant discoveries in exploration. Brown and Park's adventures formed a bridge to such journeys as Charles Darwin's voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, which led to a revolution in biology and full explication of the theory of evolution.

Drivers exiting the New Jersey Turnpike for Perth Amboy, and map readers marveling at all the places in Pennsylvania named Lackawanna, need no longer wonder how these names originated. "Manhattan to Minisink "provides the histories of more than five hundred place names in the Greater New York area, including the five boroughs, western Long Island, the New York counties north of the city, and parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Robert S. Grumet, a leading ethnohistorian specializing in the region's Indian peoples, draws on his meticulous research and deep knowledge to determine the origins of Native, and Native-sounding, place names.

Grumet divides his encyclopedic entries into two parts. The first comprises an alphabetical listing of nearly 340 Indian place names preserved in colonial records, located by county and state. Each entry includes the name's language of origin, if known, and a brief discussion of its etymology, including its earliest known occurrence in written records, the history of its appearance on maps, and the name's current status.

The book's second section presents nearly 200 place names that, though widely believed to be of Indian origin, are "imports, inventions, invocations, or impostors." Mistranslations are abundant in place names, and Grumet has ferreted out the mistakes and deceptions among home-grown colonial etymologies that New Yorkers have accepted for centuries.

Complete with a concise history of Greater New York, a discussion of the region's naming practices, a useful timeline, and four maps, this is an invaluable resource both for scholars and for readers who want a more intimate knowledge of the place where they live or visit.

Governing Compact Cities investigates how governments and other critical actors organise to enable compact urban growth, combining higher urban densities, mixed use and urban design quality with more walkable and public transport-oriented urban development. Philipp Rode draws on empirical evidence from London and Berlin to examine how urban policymakers, professionals and stakeholders have worked across disciplinary silos, geographic scales and different time horizons since the early 1990s. The key mechanisms for integrated urban governance which enable more compact growth are identified by focusing on the underlying institutional arrangements that have connected strategic urban planning, city design and transport policy in the two case study cities. These include a hybrid model of hierarchical and network governance, the effectiveness of continuous adjustment over disruptive, one-off ?integration fixes? and the prioritisation of certain links between sectoral policy and geographic scales over others. With an interdisciplinary approach connecting urban studies and planning with political science, public administration and organisational studies, this book will be of interest to academics and students in those disciplines, as well as urban practitioners and the applied/policy research community.

This book covers the fundamentals of satellite microwave instrument calibration, remote sensing sciences and algorithms, as well as the applications of the satellite microwave observations in weather and climate research.

Aimed at those at the forefront of social ecological thinking, this book presents a practice-oriented process to navigate the complex, interdisciplinary challenges of our time. The book brings together insights from the social sciences and beyond to introduce readers to 'adaptive doing' - a continuous and iterative process of experiential learning that provides an accessible structure and process for integrating a range of knowledge and practices. As part of the 'adaptive doing' learning cycle, the authors argue for a common platform, symbolically called 'the agora', where multiple ways of understanding can be discussed. In this space, participants can work from practice and narratives, toward meaning, knowledge formation and practice change. The book demonstrates three reframing tools for social ecological practice that provide readers with multiple ways of holistically entering the social ecological domain and expanding their perspectives with a view to changing practice. 'Adaptive doing' is presented as a catalyst for a new generation of social ecological research, in which participants honour their disciplinary foundations while being ready to collaborate within each new system, and each new engagement: being able to act now, for social ecological recognition and change.

This comprehensive literature review presents key contributions to the topic of regional economic advantage. It helps the reader to understand how regions build advantage for industrial development through the use of endogenous and exogenous resources, how regional industrial development can be supported by place-based policy, and how the form and mechanisms of regional advantage change over time in a path dependent manner. Also analysed is research on industrial districts and new industrial spaces, as well as regional clusters and innovation systems, along with more recent discussion of global development impulses and evolutionary perspectives on regional development. Written by three experts in the field, this important review is an essential resource for those studying, researching or practicing in this area.

With an emphasis on everyday life, this respected text offers a lively and perceptive account of the key theories and ideas which dominate the field of consumption and consumer culture. This third revised and expanded edition is a major update of the text of the second edition, adding new chapters on youth culture and consumption, retail psychology, gender and consumption, the globalization of food and FairTrade, and digital consumption and platform capitalism. Various theoretical perspectives - such as theories of practice, semiotics, to psychoanalysis - are used to illustrate concepts and trends in consumption, whilst a wide range of engaging and up-to-date case studies are employed throughout to provide historical context and illustrate forms of consumption. Written by an experienced teacher, the book offers an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the concept of consumption for students in sociology, cultural studies, history, anthropology, and social psychology.

This book focuses on geochemical behavior and ancient records of the specific biomarker levoglucosan in Tibetan glaciers, Based on samples from the Zangsegangri (ZSGR) ice cores obtained from the central Tibetan Plateau, it presents annually resolved levoglucosan records and fire changes over the past 430 years. It also discusses the interaction between fire, climate change, and human activities. This is the first effort to reconstruct annual resolution fire records in Tibetan ice, providing crucial information and substantially improved analytical methods toward a better understanding of past fire changes.

This book provides applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in environmental monitoring, with an emphasis on livestock disease detection and agricultural management in Africa to aid farmers. This proposed system entails current and innovative monitoring technologies intended to improve agricultural conditions in Africa, with a focus on Botswana, and addresses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a set of remote monitoring protocols using WSNs to improve and ensure proper environmental maintenance. In this book, the author introduces WSNs, and how the IoT can be applied to develop a system of "smart agriculture" in Africa, taking into account livestock health, climate change impacts on crops and wildlife, and technological innovations in response to climate change such as windmills and solar panels. The book will be interesting to students and researchers in engineering and life sciences, as well as practitioners working with sensing technologies for agricultural monitoring and improvement.

This book describes a participatory case study of a small family farm in Maharashtra, India. It is a dialectical study of cultivating cultivation: how paddy cultivation is learnt and taught, and why it is the way it is. The paddy cultivation that the family is doing at first appears to be 'traditional'. But by observation and working along with the family, the authors have found that they are engaging in a dynamic process in which they are questioning, investigating, and learning by doing. The authors compare this to the process of doing science, and to the sort of learning that occurs in formal education. The book presents evidence that paddy cultivation has always been varying and evolving through chance and necessity, experimentation, and economic contingencies. Through the example of one farm, the book provides a critique of current attempts to sustain agriculture, and an understanding of the ongoing agricultural crisis.

This book provides insight into the topic of place and territorial identity, which involves both the dimension of collective belonging and the politics of territorial planning and enhancement. It considers the social, economic and political effects of territorial identity representations among others in terms of mystification, spatial fetishism, and the creation of place and territorial stereotypes. A mixed methodology is employed to research case studies at diverse territorial scales which are relevant to the impact of a variety of factors on place/territorial identity processes such as migration, political and economic changes, natural disasters, land use changes, etc. Visual imagery, constructing visual discourses and living within visual cultures are placed in the foreground and refer to among others the changes and challenges introduced by the Internet and social networks in place/territory representations and self-representations; identity politics and its impact on place/territorial identity representations; discourses in shaping representations and self-representations of territorial/place-based identities related to collective memory, cultural heritage, invented tradition, imagined communities and other key notions.

This book addresses the mystery and diversity of urbanization in China, especially with regard to urban villages. The "village in the city" is a unique social phenomenon in the process of Chinese urbanization. A local village society composed of deep-rooted social networks linked by blood, geography, folk beliefs, and folk customs is the outcome of a complex social process, which is accompanied by changes in property rights, restructuring of social networks, and conflicting benefits and values. The end of the village is the epitome of social transformation, and for China as a whole, this change may take a very long time to complete. This book includes various examples of and stories on urban villages, offering readers a wealth of insights into the phenomenon and its significance.

This book focuses on the urban wind environment of urban center district. Through urban spatial morphology and urban space units it provides in-depth evaluation and research on the correlation between urban spatial morphology indicator and urban wind environment. Based on urban spatial morphology indicators, such as building density, FAR, average building height and wind environment parameter, it conducts quantitative analysis and statistic evaluation to acquire the influence relationship between urban planning indicators and wind speed. In addition, based on the 13 typical urban morphology units it also analyses the different situation of wind environment. Finally it provides the optimized strategies on urban planning, architecture and landscape. It intertwines the quantitative research between wind environment and urban morphology through in-depth analysis and urban microclimate simulation. It makes a valuable contribution for the research on urban environment and urban morphology.

other books have focused on environmental injustice in the U.S. South, no single volume has examined such issues and problems in Florida at the metropolitan scale. This book is a compilation of original empirical research on the nexus between the environmental and social inequalities in Tampa Bay, Florida's fastest growing metropolitan area. Systematic research about spatial and environmental justice are largely absent from the rich historiography of Florida, especially the Tampa Bay metropolitan area of southwest Florida. Recent empirical evidence suggests that environmental justice is a real and emergent problem within Tampa Bay afflicting many deprived communities and socially excluded groups. Moreover, certain communities are not only unevenly exposed to environmental risks, but are also disproportionately vulnerable to their many adverse health effects. Our book thus fills a critical need to explore both the causes and consequences of environmental injustice in Tampa Bay. This book combines the latest theoretical insights on spatial and environmental justice with empirical case studies which examine racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequities associated with various undesirable land uses and pollution sources in Hillsborough County, Tampa Bay's largest population and economic center. The book offers a progressive approach to a more long-term, comprehensive examination of a rapidly emerging field of study that provides academic scholars and decision-makers with new perspectives on a variety of environmental and social challenges confronting metropolitan Florida in the 21st century. It could offer guidance to metropolitan policy makers and planners, especially public health professionals, social welfare providers, infrastructure developers, emergency responders, and community activists. For this reason, this book should also be of interest to business associations, environmental groups, and members of the general public.