This book presents a compendium of the urban layout maps of 2-mile square downtown areas of more than one hundred cities in developed and developing countries-all drawn at the same scale using high-resolution satellite images of Google Maps. The book also presents analytic studies using metric geometrical, topological (or network), and fractal measures of these maps. These analytic studies identify ordinaries, extremes, similarities, and differences in these maps; investigate the scaling properties of these maps; and develop precise descriptive categories, types and indicators for multidimensional comparative studies of these maps. The findings of these studies indicate that many geometric relations of the urban layouts of downtown areas follow regular patterns; that despite social, economic, and cultural differences among cities, the geometric measures of downtown areas in cities of developed and developing countries do not show significant differences; and that the geometric possibilities of urban layouts are vastly greater than those that have been realized so far in our cities.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the complexities of newborn survival in resource-poor regions, using the state of Bihar (India) as a case study. It provides important lessons for other low-performing countries, in similar socioeconomic contexts, where newborn survival is a major challenge. The volume opens with a brief account of the trends and regional variations in neonatal mortality. The empirical verification of socio-cultural, economic and health system barriers and the state interventions that affect newborn survival are subsequently explored. Innovative strategies are then proposed to scale up maternal newborn and child health (MNCH) services and improve neonatal health outcomes. Addressing this issue through appropriate policy action is essential to achieving Sustainable Development Goal-3, "Good Health and Well-being". This book will therefore appeal to public health scholars, professionals and policymakers interested in improving outcomes in low-income regions.

A beautiful, meditative memoir mixed with travel and history, this unique book is the story of one American’s search for a deeper connection to the land. Drawn by a sense that he is missing a critical link to his home in suburban Ohio, John W. Simpson heads for rural Scotland, where he encounters his own family history as well as estate owners and tenant farmers who have centuries-long ties to their land.

As he travels, he meditates on the legacy of the great 19th century conservationist John Muir, who himself developed a complex love of the land when he immigrated from Scotland’s North Sea coast to the fields and forests of Wisconsin. As Simpson physically retraces Muir’s journey he wonders what sense of belonging Muir found on the frontier that modern America, with its strip malls and housing developments, has forgotten. A fascinating story of changing perceptions and values from the Old World to the New, Yearning for the Land shows us just how much roots matter—both in our own lives, and in the many ways time and history, landscape and community are tightly intertwined.

Public transport in low-income Asian (LIA) cities fails to meet people's mobility needs, generates high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and worsens social exclusion. Following successful Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects in Bogota and Curitiba, LIA countries promoted BRT in their large to medium-sized cities. However, the political and institutional structure distinctive to LIA cities makes their implementation difficult. This book investigates policy tensions by examining the planning and attempted implementation of BRT projects, taking Bandung and Surabaya in Indonesia as case studies. It analyses BRT to understand how power and communication gaps in institutional relationships between different actors at multiple levels of governance create conflict, and concludes that top-down policies and funding mechanisms cause tension in intergovernmental relationships. It also found that BRT solutions generated socio-political tension arising from the socio-economic realities and local political dynamics that shaped city structure, mobility patterns and capacity in resolving conflicts. The superimposed BRT solution generated discursive tension because conflicting discourses were not aligned with local economic, social, and environmental issues. The book highlights the need to take into consideration the vital role of local social and political actors, institutions and planning processes as they respond to and shape policies that are imposed by higher levels.

How is London responding to social and economic crises, and to the challenges of sustaining its population, economy and global status? Sustainable development discourse has come to permeate different policy fields, including transport, housing, property development and education. In this exciting book, authors highlight the uneven impacts and effects of these policies in London, including the creation of new social and economic inequalities. The contributors seek to move sustainable city debates and policies in London towards a progressive, socially just future that advances the public good. The book is essential reading for urban practitioners and policy makers, and students in social, urban and environmental geography, sociology and urban studies.

Responding to the deteriorating situation of migrants today and the complex assemblages of the geographies they navigate, Coercive Geographies examines historical and contemporary forms of coercion and constraint exercised by a wide range of actors in diverse settings. It links the question of spatial confines to that of labor. This fraught nexus of mobility and work seems self-evidently relevant to explore. Coercive Geographies is our attempt to bring together space, precarity, labor coercion and mobility in an analytical lens. Precarity emerges in particular geographical and historical contexts, which are decisive for how it is shaped. The book analyzes coercive geographies as localized and spatialized intersections between labor regulations and migration policies, which become detrimental to existing mobility frameworks. Contributors include: Irina Aguiari, Abdulkadir Osman Farah, Leandros Fischer, Konstantinos Floros, Johan Heinsen, Martin Bak Jorgensen, Martin Ottovay Jorgensen, Apostolos Kapsalis, Karin Krifors, Sven Van Melkebeke, Susi Meret, and Vasileios Spyridon Vlassis.

This book offers insights into the process and the practice of local economic development. Bridging the gap between theory and practice it demonstrates the relevance of theory to inform local strategic planning in the context of widespread disparities in regional economic performance. The book summarizes the core theories of economic development, applies each of these to professional practice, and provides detailed commentary on them. This updated second edition includes more recent contributions - regional innovation, agglomeration and dynamic theories – and presents the major ideas that inform economic development strategic planning, particularly in the United States and Canada. The text offers theoretical insights that help explain why some regions thrive while others languish and why metropolitan economies often rise and fall over time. Without theory, economic developers can only do what is politically feasible. This text, however, provides them with a logical tool for thinking about development and establishing an independent basis from which to build the local consensus needed for evidence-based action undertaken in the public interest. Offering valuable perspectives on both the process and the practice of local and regional economic development, this book will be useful for both current and future economic developers to think more profoundly and confidently about their local economy.

The world's leading experts contribute to our understanding of regional innovation, cluster formation and the factors that influence regional productivity and innovative performance. The text improves our understanding of the reasons why, how and where innovation clusters emerge, as well as the factors that determine their respective success or failure. In doing so, it provides a timely and comprehensive picture on innovation, location, networks and clusters as important means in an environment of intensifying interregional competition. The book is written for professional researchers as well as for students and practitioners in politics, business and consultancy.

The globalized economy depends on local and context-specific factors. This edited volume addresses local-global nexuses via case studies of global interactions in developed and developing areas, and of particular firms' approaches to these issues. The chapters build up a prospectus on how best to create globally capable localities.

'Resilience' has become one of the first fully fledged academic and political buzzwords of the 21st century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically engaged and conceptually robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of inner-city voluntary sector organisations deemed 'service hubs'. The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner-city regions - London, Los Angeles and Sydney - in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. DeVerteuil shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical works on 'resilience' and offers a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers in the voluntary sector.

This thesis constitutes an extraordinary innovative research approach in transferring the concepts and methods of complex systems to risk research. It ambitiously bridges the barriers between theoretical, empirical and methodical research work and integrates these fields into one comprehensive approach of dealing with uncertainty in socio-ecological systems. The developed agent-based simulation aims at the dynamics of social vulnerability in the considered system of the German North Sea Coast. Thus, the social simulation provides an analytical method to explore the individual, relational, and spatial aspects leading to dynamics of vulnerability in society. Combining complexity science and risk research by the method of agent-based simulation hereby emphasizes the importance of understanding interrelations inside the system for the system's development, i.e. for the evolving. Based on a vulnerability assessment regarding vulnerability characteristics, present risk behavior and self-protection preferences of private households against the impacts of flooding and storm surges, possible system trajectories could be explored by means of simulation experiments. The system-analytical approach therefore contributes to an integrated consideration of multi-dimensional and context-sensitv social phenomena such as vulnerability. Furthermore it achieves conceptually and strategically relevant implications for risk research and complex systems research.

The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism's possibilities, aspirations and applications-as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents-so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.

This work examines the valley of the Urubamba River in terms of vertical zonation, Incan impact on the environment, plant use, the history of exploration and the notion of discovery, the idea of land reform, and cultural contact with the European world. Winding its path northward from the Andean Highlands to the Amazon, the valley has served as the stage of pre-Columbian civilizations and focal point of Spanish conquest in Peru. "Gade left behind not only a superb body of scholarly work, but a network of colleagues and students who remain indebted to his example. This book should serve as an inspiration for all scholars who wish to pursue the Sauerian, counter enlightenment or post development agendas of understanding and respecting particular places in all their historical and cultural complexity, including ambiguities and contradictions." -- The Geographical Review, American Geographical Society

This volume discusses the latest techniques and their economic applications for modern industries like computer, pharmaceutical, banking and other manaufacturing. These industries are most important for a growing economy. Both econometric and mathematical programming techniques are analyzed so as to develop a synthetic approach. The industrial applications not only emphasize the various aspects of R&D spending, advertisement expenditure and imperfect market structures, but also assess the economic benefits of measuring some specific performance paremers in the light of policy reforms adopted in a growing economy.

Women at the Border analyzes border policing practices currently informed by paradigms of securitization against unauthorized mobility and explores the potential for a paradigm shift to a more ethical regulation of borders. By focusing on the ways women have sought to cross borders in extra -legal fashion, the book shows how border enforcement differentially impacts on some populations and makes the case that unauthorized migration requires management rather than repulsion and criminalization. When facing the emerging and future challenges of unauthorized mobility, border policing must be recast as a function of human rights that results in greater human security at the border. Examining gender and border policing across Europe, North America and Australia, this book enhances our understanding of the gendered determinants of extra -legal border crossing, border policing and the changing dynamics of unauthorized mobility.

It is difficult to speak about Europe today without reference to its constitutive regions-supra-national geographical designations such as "Scandinavia," "Eastern Europe," and "the Balkans." Such formulations are so ubiquitous that they are frequently treated as empirical realities rather than a series of shifting, overlapping, and historically constructed concepts. This volume is the first to provide a synthetic account of these concepts and the historical and intellectual contexts in which they emerged. Bringing together prominent international scholars from across multiple disciplines, it systematically and comprehensively explores how such "meso-regions" have been conceptualized throughout modern European history.

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

This book is a collection of work by scholars currently pursuing research on human security and insecurities in Southeast Asia. It deals with a set of 'insecurities' that is not readily understood or measurable. As such, it conceptually locates the threats and impediments to 'human security' within relationships of risk, uncertainty, safety and trust. At the same time, it presents a wide variety of investigations and approaches from both localized and regional perspectives. By focusing on the human and relational dimensions of insecurities in Southeast Asia it highlights the ways in which vulnerable and precarious circumstances (human insecurities) are part of daily life for large numbers of people in Southeast Asia and are mainly beyond their immediate control. Many of the situations people experience in Southeast Asia represent the real outcomes of a range of largely unacknowledged socio-cultural-economic transformations interlinked by local, national, regional and global forces, factors and interests. Woven from experience and observations of life at various sites in Southeast Asia, the contributions in this volume give an internal and critical perspective to a complex and manifold issue. They draw attention to a variety of the less-than-obvious threats to human security and show how perplexing those threats can be. All of which underscores the significance of multidisciplinary approaches in rethinking and responding to the complex array of conditioning factors and interests underlying human insecurities in Southeast Asia.

Milieus of Creativity is the second volume in the book series Knowledge and Space. This book deals with spatial disparities of knowledge and the impact of environments, space and contexts on the production and application of knowledge. The contributions in this volume focus on the role of places, environments, and spatial contexts for the emergence and perpetuation of creativity. Is environment a social or a spatial phenomenon? Are only social factors relevant for the development of creativity or should one also include material artefacts and resources in its definition? How can we explain spatial disparities of creativity without falling victim to geodeterminism?

This book offers insights from various disciplines such as environmental psychology, philosophy, and social geography. It presents the results of a research conference at Heidelberg University in September 2006, which was supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.

Is public transportation a right? Should it be? For those reliant on public transit, the answer is invariably "yes" to both. Indeed, when city officials propose slashing service or raising fares, it is these riders who are often the first to appear at that officials' door demanding their "right" to more service. Rights in Transit starts from the presumption that such riders are justified. For those who lack other means of mobility, transit is a lifeline. It offers access to many of the entitlements we take as essential: food, employment, and democratic public life itself. While accepting transit as a right, this book also suggests that there remains a desperate need to think critically, both about what is meant by a right and about the types of rights at issue when public transportation is threatened. Drawing on a detailed case study of the various struggles that have come to define public transportation in California's East Bay, Rights in Transit offers a direct challenge to contemporary scholarship on transportation equity. Rather than focusing on civil rights alone, Rights in Transit argues for engaging the more radical notion of the right to the city.

This volume is devoted to the geographical-or spatial-aspects of population research in regional science, spanning spatial demographic methods for population composition and migration to studies of internal and international migration to investigations of the role of population in related fields such as climate change and economic growth. If spatial aspects of economic growth and development are the flagship of the regional science discipline, population research is the anchor. People migrate, consume, produce, and demand services. People are the source and beneficiaries of national, regional, and local growth and development. Since the origins of regional science, demographic research has been at the core of the discipline. Contributions in this volume are both retrospective and prospective, offering in their ensemble an authoritative overview of demographic research within the field of regional science.

This book contributes to an understanding of how bifurcation theory adapts to the analysis of economic geography. It is easily accessible not only to mathematicians and economists, but also to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in nonlinear mathematics. The self-organization of hexagonal agglomeration patterns of industrial regions was first predicted by the central place theory in economic geography based on investigations of southern Germany. The emergence of hexagonal agglomeration in economic geography models was envisaged by Krugman. In this book, after a brief introduction of central place theory and new economic geography, the missing link between them is discovered by elucidating the mechanism of the evolution of bifurcating hexagonal patterns. Pattern formation by such bifurcation is a well-studied topic in nonlinear mathematics, and group-theoretic bifurcation analysis is a well-developed theoretical tool. A finite hexagonal lattice is used to express uniformly distributed places, and the symmetry of this lattice is expressed by a finite group. Several mathematical methodologies indispensable for tackling the present problem are gathered in a self-contained manner. The existence of hexagonal distributions is verified by group-theoretic bifurcation analysis, first by applying the so-called equivariant branching lemma and next by solving the bifurcation equation. This book offers a complete guide for the application of group-theoretic bifurcation analysis to economic agglomeration on the hexagonal lattice.

This book contains a selection of papers from the 16th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), the premier long-running forum in geographical information science. This collection offers readers exemplary contributions to geospatial scholarship and practice from the conference's 30th anniversary.

The lifecourse perspective continues to be an important subject in the social sciences. Researching the Lifecourse offers a distinctive approach in that it truly covers the lifecourse (childhood, adulthood and older age), focusing on innovative methods and case study examples from a variety of European and North American contexts. This original approach connects theory and practice from across the social sciences by situating methodology and research design within relevant conceptual frameworks. This diverse collection features methods that are linked to questions of time, space and mobilities while providing practitioners with practical detail in each chapter.