This book presents multi-sector practical cases based on the author's own research. It also includes the best practice, which could serve as a benchmark for the creation of smart cities. The global urbanisation index, i.e., the ratio of city dwellers to the total population, has been steadily increasing in recent years. It is highest in the Americas, followed by Europe, Asia and Africa. The city of the future will combine the intelligent use of IT systems with the potential of institutions, companies and committed, creative inhabitants. The administrative boundaries of today's cities put certain constraints on their further growth, but in the future these boundaries will no longer be as relevant. Cities in Europe face the challenge of reconciling sustainable urban development and competitiveness - a challenge that will likely influence issues of urban quality such as the economy, culture, social and environmental conditions, changing a given city's profile as well as urban quality in terms of its composition and characteristics.

Since the 1960s the resource-poor countries have grown much faster that the resource-rich ones. This reflects basic differences in the speed of industrialization and the nature of the political state that are rooted in the natural resource endowment. Most resource-rich countries experienced a growth collapse in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows how policies for economic recovery must be adapted to reflect differences in the natural resource base and type of political state.

Whenever we open our mouths to speak, we provide those who hear us, chosen interlocuters or mere bystanders, with a wealth of data, linguistic clues others use to position us within a specific social strata. Our particular uses of language mark us geographically, ethnically, by age or sex, and, especially in stratified societies, according to class or caste. This collection of papers by researchers in cultural and linguistic anthropology examine these concepts as well as many others. Linguists, anthropologists, and others concerned with the formal study of the social uses and functions of language are concerned with documenting the implications of such judging on the lives of various peoples around the world and among the classes within their own societies. What linguistic features of speech are used to form stereotypical impressions about the social identity (as well as the character) of others? How are linguistic features linked to ethnicity, to gender, to race, and to class? This collection of papers by researchers in cultural and linguistic anthropology examine these concepts as well as many others.

This book is intended for researchers, practitioners and students who are interested in the current trends and want to make their GI applications and research dynamic. Time is the key element of contemporary GIS: mobile and wearable electronics, sensor networks, UAVs and other mobile snoopers, the IoT and many other resources produce a massive amount of data every minute, which is naturally located in space as well as in time. Time series data is transformed into almost (from the human perspective) continuous data streams, which require changes to the concept of spatial data recording, storage and manipulation. This book collects the latest innovative research presented at the GIS Ostrava 2017 conference held in 2017 in Ostrava, Czech Republic, under the auspices of EuroSDR and EuroGEO. The accepted papers cover various aspects of dynamics in GIscience, including spatiotemporal data analysis and modelling; spatial mobility data and trajectories; real-time geodata and real-time applications; dynamics in land use, land cover and urban development; visualisation of dynamics; open spatiotemporal data; crowdsourcing for spatiotemporal data and big spatiotemporal data.

Sicker explores the political history of the Middle East from antiquity to the Arab conquest from a geopolitical perspective. He argues that there are a number of relatively constant environmental factors that have helped "condition"-not determine-the course of Middle Eastern political history from ancient times to the present. These factors, primarily, but not exclusively geography and topography, contributed heavily to establishing the patterns of state development and interstate relations in the Middle East that have remained remarkably consistent throughout the troubled history of the region.

In addition to geography and topography, the implications of which are explored in depth, religion has also played a major political role in conditioning the pattern of Middle Eastern history. The Greeks first introduced the politicization of religious belief into the region in the form of pan-Hellenism, which essentially sought to impose Greek forms of popular religion and culture on the indigenous peoples of the region as a means of solidifying Greek political control. This ultimately led to religious persecution as a state policy. Subsequently, the Persian Sassanid Empire adopted Zoroastrianism as the state religion for the same purpose and with the same result. Later, when Armenia adopted Christianity as the state religion, followed soon after by the Roman Empire, religion and the intolerance it tended to breed became fundamental ingredients, in regional politics and have remained such ever since. Sicker shows that the political history of the pre-Islamic Middle East provides ample evidence that the geopolitical and religious factors conditioning political decision-making tended to promote military solutions to political problems, making conflict resolution through war the norm, with the peaceful settlement of disputes quite rare. A sweeping synthesis that will be of considerable interest to scholars, students, and others concerned with Middle East history and politics as well as international relations and ancient history.

This book focuses on interdisciplinary issues of human health in the changing urban environments of India's largest megacities-Delhi and Mumbai. The authors explore human health concerns related to increased temperatures and air pollution in these cities in a study based on primary data collected through interviews, as well as secondary data on causes of mortality from 2001 to 2012. During this period, the surface temperatures for both megacities were mapped using Landsat Images. The rapidly increasing populations of cities and urban centers alter ecosystem services such as water, air and land cover, with disastrous impacts on health and wellbeing, particularly in megacities. In 2015, polluted air was estimated to have been responsible for 6.4 million deaths worldwide, and it is projected that it will cause between 6 and 9 million deaths per year by 2060. In 2017, outdoor air pollution resulted in 1.2 million deaths in India and brought about a 3% loss in GDP. The increase in population, vehicles, and industries has led to changes in land use and land cover and a rise in city temperatures and air pollution, creating urban heat islands (UHIs). Together, UHIs and air pollution have damaging impacts on human health that range from stress and headache to asthma, bronchitis, and chronic diseases, and even to death. Delhi has been experiencing emergency conditions in terms of environmental health over the past two years. At the same time, both the Delhi and Mumbai urban agglomerations are growing at a rapid pace, and the United Nations has projected that they will be the second and third most populous cities in the world by 2025. In this context, the book offers significant insights into the past patterns and responses to the present global urban health emergencies, and explores sustainable means of combating the problem to enable college and university researchers to develop innovative solutions. Further. It presents trans-disciplinary research that cuts across the WHO Action Plan, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and Habitat III to help policymakers gain a better understanding of the global challenges of urban health and wellbeing. The book is especially useful for students and researchers in geography, urban demography, urban studies, environmental studies, health sciences, and policy studies.

This multidisciplinary work analyses challenges to sustainable development amidst rapidly changing climate in the world's largest delta - the Sundarbans. Empirical evidence unpacks grounded vulnerabilities and reveals their temporal socio-economic impacts. A novel concept of 'everyday disasters' is proposed - supported by data and photographic evidence - that contests institutional disaster definition. Then it uncovers how the geopolitics of ecological governance and its hegemonic discourse dominate local policies, which in turn fail to address local socio-ecological concerns, adaptation needs and development aspirations. Absence of local vocabularies, cognitive values and socio-cultural contexts along with spatially constricted, exclusionary, top-down techno-science approaches further escalate knowledge-action gaps. Deconstruction of multiscalar conflicts between the global rhetoric and transformative postcolonial geographies offers an ethical, Southern perspective of sustainability.

This book is specifically designed to serve the community of postgraduates and researchers in the fields of epidemiology, health GIS, medical geography, and health management. It starts with the basic concepts and role of remote sensing, GIS in Kala-azar diseases. The book gives an exhaustive coverage of Satellite data, GPS, GIS, spatial and attribute data modeling, and geospatial analysis of Kala-azar diseases. It also presents the modern trends of remote sensing and GIS in health risk assessment with an illustrated discussion on its numerous applications.

The book investigates the relationship between ecosystem services (ES) and spatial planning, and explores potential means of integrating the two concepts to support the decision-making process. In addition, it presents case studies demonstrating the outcomes, limitations, opportunities and further new developments in ES assessment/mapping for planning support. Then it describes the "Restart from Ecosystem Services" (RES) methodology, which is aimed at integrating ES into the planning process using an ecological balance, and at promoting new planning parameters for the transformation areas. RES ensures the inclusion of ES in planning processes using the incremental measures of limiting, mitigating and compensating soil sealing and land take process promoting operational strategies in applying it. The implementation of RES is associated with strategic environmental assessment and provides valuable support in the definition of strategies across the entire planning process, especially for the evaluation of alternative scenarios.

This book offers a theoretical intervention into the normative ideals of public space that are deeply rooted in Western urbanism. It disrupts the binaries of presence/absence, inclusion/exclusion by presenting a series of case studies that vividly convey the complexity and vicissitude of grassroots spatial practices. It engages powerfully with the question of what constitutes the "urban public" in our everyday cities. Moreover, it provides a fresh perspective on the proliferating scholarship on Chinese urbanism in the reform era by seriously considering the ways in which ordinary urban inhabitants respond to and negotiate the impacts of rapid social change and the reshuffling of the systems of values and ideologies. The urban public, therefore, is analyzed as an important field in which identities and cultural differences are formed and performed. This book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in theories of urban public space in general or urban transformation of post-reform China in particular.

This book offers a dynamic perspective on regional entrepreneurship, knowledge, innovation and economic growth, with a particular focus on the role that history and culture play. The authors provide comprehensive empirical analyses offering unique insights into the spatial patterns of long-term differences of regional self-employment, new business formation, cultures of entrepreneurship, innovation activities, and development. Policy implications from the analyses and a discussion of important avenues for future research complete this unique book combining history, culture, and entrepreneurship. This is a superb book with an original, historical take on entrepreneurship and regional development. It is a landmark study on Germany showing that regional levels of entrepreneurship are persistent and resilient, despite many disruptive shocks. Ron Boschma, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Stavanger University, Norway This book presents the distilled wisdom of two leading authorities on the link between entrepreneurship and economic prosperity at a regional level. Although its prime empirical focus is on Germany there are clear lessons for scholars and policy-makers in all high-income countries. David J Storey, University of Sussex, UK

Landscape, politics and history: the Italian mountains as a crucible of national and natural identity. This book is part of a wider current in environmental history, that explores the links between nature and nation. It uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. It argues that state regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources, thereby affecting mountain communities and ecosystems. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings. The wind of 'big' history was rolling through the Alps and the Apennines: State building and national identities, totalitarianism and democracy, economic development and environmental protection, scientific knowledge and vernacular practices are the substance of this book. The book starts with the revaluation of mountains as the repository of the last Italian wilderness and chronicles the discovery/ invention of mountains as wild, primitive, and rebellious places needing to be tamed. War World I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. Having been the sanctuary of Resistance against the Nazi-Fascist occupation, the Italian mountains were emptied by the economic boom of the 1960s; only recently have the green of natural parks and the white of the ski resorts become the distinctive colors of the new, tourist-oriented Italian mountains.

Recent controversies over the political and environmental management of the Antarctic ensure that it will remain an important global issue. Drawing on recent developments in critical geopolitics and cultural geography, Klaus Dodds examines the six major nations of the Southern hemisphere currently involved in the Antarctic. Each of these nations - Argentina, Australia, Chile, India, New Zealand and South Africa - claims a ‘natural’ interest in the future of the polar continent. Geopolitics in Antarctica presents a detailed exploration of the rhetoric and politics behind each of these claims, arguing that they are often based on uncritical understandings of territory, geographical proximity and national identity. The book concludes with an examination of how geographical understandings of the Antarctic continue to influence the management of the frozen continent and Southern Ocean.

This book presents an alternative theory of globalization that derives not from the dominant perspective of the West, from which this process emerged, but from the critical vantage point of the Third World, which has borne the heaviest burdens of globalization. It offers a critical and uniquely first-hand perspective that is lacking not only from the apologists of Western hegemony, but from most scholars writing against this hegemony from within the globalizing world. Renowned throughout Latin America and parts of Europe, the author, Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, has long been for the most part inaccessible to the English-speaking world. Only one of his books, The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries, published in 1975, has been translated into English; nevertheless, the works of Santos's most important phase, from the 1980s until his death in 2001, have remained unavailable to English readers. With the translation of Toward an Other Globalization, one of the last works published in Santos's lifetime, this situation has finally been rectified. In this book, Santos argues that we must consider globalization in three different senses: globalization as a fable (the world as globalizing agents make us believe), as perversity (the world as it is presently, in the throes of globalization), and as possibility (the world as it could be). What emerges from the analysis of these three senses is an alternative theory of globalization rooted in the perspective of the so-called Global South. Santos concludes his text with a message that is optimistic, but in no way nai ve. What he offers instead is a revolutionary optimism and, indeed, an other globalization.

What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city. Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.

This book provides theoretical perspectives and practical experiences on smart governance for smart cities. It presents a balanced linkage between research, policies and practices on this area. The authors discuss the sustainability challenges raised by rapid urbanization, challenges with smart governance models in various countries, and a new governance paradigm seen as a capable approach able to overcome social, economic and environmental sustainability problems. The authors include case studies on transformation, adaption and transfers; and country, regional, municipal contextualization. Also included are best practices on monitoring and evaluating smart governance and impact assessment. The book features contributions from researchers, academics, and practitioners in the field. Analyzes smart governance for cities from a variety of perspectives and a variety of sectors - both in theory and in practice Features information on the linkage between United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and smart governance Covers the connection between research, policies and practice in smart governance for smart cities

Cities are home to over fifty percent of the world's population, a figure which is expected to increase enormously by 2050. Despite the growing demand on urban resources and infrastructure, food is still often overlooked as a key factor in planning and designing cities. Without incorporating food into the design process - how it is grown, transported, and bought, cooked, eaten and disposed of - it is impossible to create truly resilient and convivial urbanism. Moving from the table and home garden to the town, city, and suburbs, Food and Urbanism explores the connections between food and place in past and present design practices. The book also looks to future methods for extending the 'gastronomic' possibilities of urban space. Supported by examples from places across the world, including the UK, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Australia and the USA, the book offers insights into how the interplay of physical design and socio-spatial practices centred around food can help to maintain socially rich, productive and sustainable urban space. Susan Parham brings together the latest research from a number of disciplines - urban planning, food studies, sociology, geography, and design - with her own fieldwork on a range of foodscapes to highlight the fundamental role food has to play in shaping the urban future.

American communities are facing chronic problems: fiscal stress, urban decline, environmental sprawl, mass incarceration, political isolation, disproportionate foreclosures and severe public health risks. In The Price of Paradise, David Troutt argues that it is a lack of mutuality in our local decision making that has led to this looming crisis facing cities and local governments. Arguing that there are structural flaws in the American dream, Troutt investigates the role that place plays in our thinking and how we have organized our communities to create or deny opportunity. Legal rules and policies that promoted mobility for most citizens simultaneously stifled and segregated a growing minority by race, class and-most importantly-place. A conversation about America at the crossroads, The Price of Paradise is a multilayered exploration of the legal, economic and cultural forces that contribute to the squeeze on the middle class, the hidden dangers of growing income and wealth inequality and the literature on how growth and consumption patterns are environmentally unsustainable.

This is the second volume in a two-part series on frontiers in regional research. It identifies methodological advances as well as trends and future developments in regional systems modelling and open science. Building on recent methodological and modelling advances, as well as on extensive policy-analysis experience, top international regional scientists identify and evaluate emerging new conceptual and methodological trends and directions in regional research. Topics such as dynamic interindustry modelling, computable general equilibrium models, exploratory spatial data analysis, geographic information science, spatial econometrics and other advanced methods are the central focus of this book. The volume provides insights into the latest developments in object orientation, open source, and workflow systems, all in support of open science. It will appeal to a wide readership, from regional scientists and economists to geographers, quantitatively oriented regional planners and other related disciplines. It offers a source of relevant information for academic researchers and policy analysts in government, and is also suitable for advanced teaching courses on regional and spatial science, economics and political science.

This book introduces the readers to the new concept of cognitive cities. It demonstrates why cities need to become cognitive and why therefore a concept of cognitive city is needed. It highlights the main building blocks of cognitive cities and illustrates the concept by various cases. Following a concise introductory chapter the book features nine chapters illustrating various aspects and dimensions of cognitive cities. The logic of its structure proceeds from more general considerations to more specific illustrations. All chapters offer a comprehensive view of the different research endeavours about cognitive cities and will help pave the way for this new and innovative approach to governing cities in the future.

This book explores ancient efforts to explain the scientific, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of water. From the ancient point of view, we investigate many questions including: How does water help shape the world? What is the nature of the ocean? What causes watery weather, including superstorms and snow? How does water affect health, as a vector of disease or of healing? What is the nature of deep-sea-creatures (including sea monsters)? What spiritual forces can protect those who must travel on water? This first complete study of water in the ancient imagination makes a major contribution to classics, geography, hydrology and the history of science alike. Water is an essential resource that affects every aspect of human life, and its metamorphic properties gave license to the ancient imagination to perceive watery phenomena as the product of visible and invisible forces. As such, it was a source of great curiosity for the Greeks and Romans who sought to control the natural world by understanding it, and who, despite technological limitations, asked interesting questions about the origins and characteristics of water and its influences on land, weather, and living creatures, both real and imagined.

Climb a mountain and experience the landscape. Try to grasp its holistic nature. Do not climb alone, but with others and share your experience. Be sure the ways of seeing the landscape will be very different. We experience the landscape with all senses as a complex, dynamic and hierarchically structured whole. The landscape is tangible out there and simultaneously a mental reality. Several perspectives are obvious because of language, culture and background. Many disciplines developed to study the landscape focussing on specific interest groups and applications. Gradually the holistic way of seeing became lost. This book explores the different perspectives on the landscape in relation to its holistic nature. We start from its multiple linguistic meanings and a comprehensive overview of the development of landscape research from its geographical origins to the wide variety of today's specialised disciplines and interest groups. Understanding the different perspectives on the landscapes and bringing them together is essential in transdisciplinary approaches where the landscape is the integrating concept.

Spatio-temporal Approaches presents a well-built set of concepts, methods and approaches, in order to represent and understand the evolution of social and environmental phenomena within the space. It is basedon examples in human geography and archeology (which will enable us to explore questions regarding various temporalities) and tackles social and environmental phenomena. Chapter 1 discusses how to apprehend change: objects, attributes, relations, processes. Chapter 2 introduces multiple points of view about modeling and the authors try to shed a new light on the different, but complementary approaches of geomaticians and thematicians. Chapter 3 is devoted to the construction of spatio-temporal indicators, to various measurements of the change, while highlighting the advantage of an approach crossing several points of view, in order to understand the phenomenon at hand. Chapter 4 presents different categories of simulation model in line with complexity sciences. These models rely notably on the concepts of emergence and self-organization and allow us to highlight the roles of interaction within change. Chapter 5 provides ideas on research concerning the various construction approaches of hybrid objects and model couplings.

This "Reader" recounts the story of the emergence and impact of postmodern thought in human geography. The editors have brought together in a single volume the pivotal writings of the period since 1965. Through these, and their connecting narratives, the editors engage what has been the most invigorating intellectual roller-coaster ride in geography's recent history.
Recounts the story of the emergence and impact of postmodern thought in human geography.
Brings together in a single volume the pivotal writings of the period since 1965.
Engages with what has been the most invigorating intellectual roller-coaster ride in geography's recent history.
Eraces the shift in human geography from a plethora of pre-postmodern paradigms to the emergence of a postmodern consciousness.
Outlines an agenda for a postmodern human geographical theory and practice that sympathetically intersects with feminism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and environmentalism.

This contributed volume applies spatial and space-time econometric methods to spatial interaction modeling. The first part of the book addresses general cutting-edge methodological questions in spatial econometric interaction modeling, which concern aspects such as coefficient interpretation, constrained estimation, and scale effects. The second part deals with technical solutions to particular estimation issues, such as intraregional flows, Bayesian PPML and VAR estimation. The final part presents a number of empirical applications, ranging from interregional tourism competition and domestic trade to space-time migration modeling and residential relocation.