This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

The main objective of this book is to provide a multidisciplinary overview of methodological approaches, architectures, platforms, and algorithms for the realization of an Internet of Things (IoT)-based Smart Urban Ecosystem (SUE). Moreover, the book details a set of real-world applications and case studies related to specific smart infrastructures and smart cities, including structural health monitoring, smart urban drainage networks, smart grids, power efficiency, healthcare, city security, and emergency management. A Smart Urban Ecosystem (SUE) is a people-centric system of systems that involves smart city environments, applications, and infrastructures. SUEs require the close integration of cyber and physical components for monitoring, understanding and controlling the urban environment. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT) offers a valuable enabling technology, as it bridges the gap between physical things and software components, and empowers cooperation between distributed, pervasive, and heterogeneous entities.

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 investigates how women's power and caste cleavages often continue to transcend and crosscut the boundaries of caste/tribe, gender, age, class and religion in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh It examines the gendered divisions of labor in rural communities and how countervailing forces have restricted women's status and roles in South Asia.

In recent years, Europe has had to constantly rethink and redefine its attitude toward new flows of immigrations. Issues of boundaries and identity have been integral to this reflection. Through a magnificent collection of essays, Migrant Cartographies examines both sites and conflicts and the way in which forms of belonging and identity have been reinvented. With careful analysis and exceptional insight, this volume explores the most recent literature on migration as seen from different European viewpoints. This book fills a conspicuous void in migration literature, as there are no comprehensive books on migrant literatures in Europe that address the full range of complexities of colonial legacies and linguistic productions.

This book represents the most important academic achievements won by Dr. Renzhi Hou, one of the founding fathers of and pioneering researchers in the modern historical geography of China. His collected papers and speeches, spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s, serve as a window into Hou's academic experience as well as the development of the historical geography of China during the second half of the 20th century. Dr. Hou has made his greatest contributions mainly in two areas, namely, urban historical geography and desert historical geography. Roughly a quarter of this book is devoted to the former, and above all to the study of Beijing's historical geography and its influence on urban planning. It is worth noting that "From Beijing to Washington-A Contemplation on the Concept of Municipal Planning," presented here, is the only historical geography-based comparative study of a Chinese city and a Western one by a Chinese scholar. Dr. Hou's studies on desert historical geography have garnered him a prominent reputation in the natural sciences academia. "Ancient City Ruins in the Deserts of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China," also included here, can be considered a masterwork. Moreover, many of his original thoughts on some interesting topics can also be found in this book, such as the communication between China and Africa in ancient times, and the rediscovery of the value of geographical classics in the modern context.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion on urban growth and sprawl, and how they can be analyzed using remote sensing imageries. It compiles views of numerous researchers that help in understanding the urban growth and sprawl; their patterns, process, causes, consequences, and countermeasures; how remote sensing data and geographic information system techniques can be used in mapping, monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and simulating the urban growth and sprawl; and what are the merits and demerits of available methods and models.

This book will be of value for the scientists and researchers engaged in urban geographic research, especially using remote sensing imageries. This book will serve as a rigours literature review for them. Post graduate students of urban geography or urban/regional planning may refer this book as additional studies. This book may help the academicians for preparing lecture notes and delivering lectures. Industry professionals may also be benefited from the discussed methods and models along with numerous citations.

The Russian Federation has a history of more than twenty years of transformation to a market economy, but as well to a knowledge society, to look back on. This study takes a look at the knowledge generation, knowledge transmission and knowledge use inside the Federation since the early 1990s. Furthermore, in light of the high dependence of the Russian economy on the oil and gas sectors this study analyzes the impact knowledge related factors have on regional income generation following thereby in the direction of Schumpeterian growth theory. The study combines descriptive with empirical analyses to paint a picture as detailed as possible of the Russian knowledge society and its innovative potential.

"New Issues in Polar Tourism" traces and analyzes a decade of growing interest in the polar regions, and the consequent challenges and opportunities of increasing tourist traffic in formerly remote and seldom-visited places. The book arises from the recently-formed International Polar Tourism Research Network(IPTRN), and documents the outcomes of its 2010 conference, held at Sweden s Abisko Scientific Research Station."

Urban Environments and Health in the Philippines offers a retrospective view of women street vendors and their urban environments in Baguio City, designed by American architect and planner Daniel Burnham in the early twentieth century, and established by the American imperial government as a place for healing and well-being. Based on a transdisciplinary multi-method study of street vendors, the author offers a unique perspective as a researcher of the place, to ultimately ask how marginalized women authenticate and democratize prime urban spaces for their livelihoods. This book provides a portal to another way of seeing and understanding streets and people, covering spatial units at multiple scales, design imperialism and its impact on health, and resilience strategies for challenging realities. Blending subjects of architecture, planning, and health, this book is an ideal read for those interested in fields of urban planning and design, public health, landscape architecture, geography, and social sciences.

The North Atlantic continues to be an area of international strategic significance regionally and globally. This study explores the strong processes of sovereignty, as well as new independent states and micro-proto-states that are forming in the region.

This book explores the importance of freedom and liberalism in the context of socialities, individualities and materialities. The authors provide a highly unusual and innovative blending of concepts about space and landscape through a deeply theoretical exploration of liberalism. Liberalism is often problematized in contemporary discussions with regard to gentrification, environmental problems and inequality. In contrast, this book refers to a liberalism that maximizes life chances in the context of dealing with spaces. A connection between freedom and space, based on liberal ideas, provides a much needed theoretical intervention in the fields of social and spatial sciences.

For those in developed nations, suddenly being without electricity is a disaster: power cuts have us fretting over the food stored in the freezer, and even a few hours without lights, televisions, or air conditioning is an ordeal. However, for an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide, the absence of electricity is their daily experience. An untold number of others live with electricity that is erratic and of poor quality. How can electric power be brought into their lives when the centralized utility models that have evolved in developed nations are not an economically viable option? Poor, rural communities in developing nations cannot simply be plugged in to a grid.

Small-scale Distributed Generation (DG), ranging from individual solar home systems to village level grids run off diesel generators, could provide the answer, and this book compares around 20 DG enterprises and projects in Brazil, Cambodia and China, each of which is considered to be a "business model" for distributed rural electrification. While large, centralized power projects often rely on big subsidies, this study shows that privately run and localized solutions can be both self-sustaining and replicable. Its three sections provide a general introduction to the issue of electrification and rural development, set out the details of the case studies and compare the models involved, and discuss the important thematic issues of equity, access to capital and cost-recovery.

Hisham Zerriffi shows that in each case, it is not simply a matter of matching a particular technology to a particular need. Numerous institutional factors come into play including the regulatory regime, access to financial services, and government/utility support or opposition to the DG alternative. Despite this, in many countries, the question is not whether DG has a role to play. Rather it is a question of how it will play a role.

This book describes how powerful computing technology, emerging big and open data sources, and theoretical perspectives on spatial synthesis have revolutionized the way in which we investigate social sciences and humanities. It summarizes the principles and applications of human-centered computing and spatial social science and humanities research, thereby providing fundamental information that will help shape future research. The book illustrates how big spatiotemporal socioeconomic data facilitate the modelling of individuals' economic behavior in space and time and how the outcomes of such models can reveal information about economic trends across spatial scales. It describes how spatial social science and humanities research has shifted from a data-scarce to a data-rich environment. The chapters also describe how a powerful analytical framework for identifying space-time research gaps and frontiers is fundamental to comparative study of spatiotemporal phenomena, and how research topics have evolved from structure and function to dynamic and predictive. As such this book provides an interesting read for researchers, students and all those interested in computational and spatial social sciences and humanities.

Zopf provides a comprehensive account of the biological components of mortality, its various forms and causes, and its many differentials. The study considers mortality among a range of populations, according to differentials such as age, gender, race, ethnic origin, socioeconomic and marital status, and urban or non-urban residence. It also traces changes in the impact of degenerative afflictions, infectious and parasitic diseases, and environmental factors. The result is a current and comprehensive treatment of changes in mortality and its causes in the United States. The many graphs and tables present succinct and clear evidence of current mortality trends, and the extensive bibliography adds to the usefulness of this work as a research tool. The text begins with an introductory overview of the components of mortality and the methods of measuring it. The following chapter analyzes mortality within the general population according to specific differentials. The study then treats patterns, trends, and causes of infant mortality. Zopf next considers the prevalence of several causes of death among different demographic groups, and he examines life expectancy for particular populations. A concluding chapter synthesizes the wealth of information contained within this work. Demographers, sociologists, and health professionals will find this volume a valuable addition to their libraries.

Sustainability of rural communities is threatened by a plethora of factors including climate change and disasters which interact in an intricate manner in making rural people vulnerable and poor. This book is the output of empirical research on communities and livelihood strategies in developing countries. It reveals how rural communities are functioning and earning their livelihoods by making the best use of the resources, local/internal or external/new and the combination of the two to counteract the various challenges they face, with the ultimate goal of becoming resilient to local or global shocks and sustaining that resilience. Local governance is identified as crucial in ensuring sustainable livelihoods as it ensures healthy collaboration between communities, on the one hand and civil society and those communities, on the other hand, in promoting self-sustaining development trajectories. Similarly, the role of social capital is not ignored as it brings in community drive and a sense of purpose, direction and solidarity among community members which facilitates problem solving in periods of crises and disasters.

This book provides comparative, multi-disciplinary research on the surplus food distribution in Europe and its relation to food poverty, with a focus on the interaction of for-profit and non-profit organisations. It offers an informed and rich discussion in understanding the collaboration between profit and non-profit organisations involved in food recovery dynamics, and provides understanding as to how the two types of players create effective, innovative and sustainable processes. Building on sociology, food justice, and sustainable management fields, the book will be of interest to a diverse range of scholars, policy makers and practitioners inspiring innovation in how to address food poverty through surplus food recovery.

How do our everyday environments inform our activities, routines and encounters? In what way has globalization affected the sites in which we work, relax and interact? Is there still a place for local identity in a globalized age? This book examines the ways in which we use local spaces and global processes to shape our identities. Showing how enhanced tourism, communication developments and increased diversity have effected the way we live every day, the text also explains how individuals, communities and cities react to such globalizing forces on a local level. Each chapter unravels complex connections between place, identity and global processes, and carefully outlines what core theory can tell us about key contemporary debates, including surveillance, environmental change and sustainability. Taking examples from urban and rural life, shopping malls and virtual worlds, the book encourages us to look at our immediate surroundings in a sociological light. Highlighting the interdependence of space and society in a rapidly changing world, this text is essential reading for those studying place and identity in Sociology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Urban Studies and Rural Studies.

Islands face one of the most pressing issues of our time: how to balance ecological integrity with economic development and collective quality of life, including the need for social and conservation space. Islands are sites of rich and varied human and ecological diversity, but they are also often characterized by narrow resource bases and dependency on links to the outside world, and by their limited ability to determine the actual character of those links. This volume reviews the challenges of island development and conservation in the Asia-Pacific region. With emphasis on nature reserves and UNESCO World Heritage sites, chapters describe the benefits, barriers, and potential pitfalls in preserving such sites, managing biota, and attracting and controlling tourism. The book also provides a provocative challenge to move beyond the typical concerns of "sustainability" to the more holistic concept of "futurability," or "future potential" for convivial human-environmental interactions.

This contributed volume is the first book in English to offer a current and critical vision of regional problems and policies in the countries of Latin America. The book is in three main parts: a general overview of regional processes and trends in Latin America as a whole; country-level coverage of seven individual countries; and comparative analyses of common major problems such as migration, education, labor, poverty, decentralization, exports and foreign direct investments. Written by renowned academics and experts from the region, the book seeks to provide a better understanding of regional challenges and trends, regional disparities that exist in many Latin American countries and the increasing importance of metropolitan areas.

This leading-edge study focuses on the latest techniques in analysing and representing the complex, multi-layered data now available to geographers studying urban zones and their populations. The volume tracks the successful results of the SPANGEO Project, which was set up in 2005 to standardize, and share, the syncretic, multinational mapping techniques already developed by geographers and computer scientists. SPANGEO sought new and responsive ways of visualising urban geographical and social data that reflected the fine-grained detail of the inputs. It allowed for visual representation of the large and complex networks and flows which are such an integral feature of the dynamism of urban geography. SPANGEO developed through the 'visual analytics loop' in which geographers collaborated with computer scientists by feeding data into the design of visualisations that in turn spawned the urge to incorporate more varied data into the visualisation. This volume covers all the relevant aspects, from conceptual principles to the tools of network analysis and the actual results flowing from their deployment. Detailed case studies set out in this volume include spatial multi-level analyses of flows in airports and sea ports, as well as the fascinating scientific networks in European cities. The volume shows how the primary concern of geography-the interaction of society with physical space-has been revivified by the complexities of new cartographical and statistical methodologies, which allow for highly detailed mapping and far more powerful computer analysis of spatial relationships."

This book tackles the challenges posed by accelerating urbanization, and demystifies Social Sustainability, the least understood of all the different areas of sustainable development. The volume's twin focus on these profoundly intertwined topics creates a nuanced and vitally important resource. Large migrations from rural areas to cities without appropriate planning and infrastructure improvements, including housing, education and health care optimization, have created significant challenges across the globe. The authors suggest technology-rich strategies to meet these challenges by careful application of data on population growth and movement to the planning, design, and construction of operational infrastructures that can sustainably support our increasingly rapid population growth.