This volume intends to summarize the most important changes in the Central European countries and their settlement network emphasizing the last 20 years since the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

This book offers cutting-edge insights in cultural transformations of the sensory with particular emphasis on environments and technologies, articulating a special moment in the sensory history of urban Europe as people's relationship with their environment is increasingly shaped through digital technologies. It is a much-needed addition to Sensory Studies literature with its firmly grounded empirical and theoretical perspectives. It provides radical and impactful food for thought on sensory engagements with urban environments. After reading the book, the reader will have a profound understanding of the original methodology of sensobiographic walking, as well as transdisciplinary and transgenerational ethnographies in different cultural contexts - in this case three European cities. The book is aimed for a large audience of readers. It is equally useful for social and human scientists and students finalizing their MA degrees or working on their doctoral or post-doctoral work, and essential reading for environmental planners, youth workers, city planners, and architects, among others.

This book draws upon diverse approaches and understandings of sustainability transformations, social transitions and environmental accountabilities. It presents case studies that highlight real-world consequences of changing ideas about how best to achieve effective and durable sustainability transformations and examines how environmental accountabilities and social transitions influence sustainability transformations. Each chapter provides insights regarding how new knowledge and perspectives matter for whether, when, and how people, governments, corporations and international organisations seek and pursue solutions to social-ecological challenges and sustainability dilemmas. It pays sustained attention to whether and how understandings and applications of accountability can improve international sustainability transformations. The chapters presented in this book consider some pressing questions concerning social transitions and environmental accountabilities: how can they contribute to sustainability transformations, how do they influence the scalability of sustainability transformations, and, how can such sustainability transformations become durable?

This volume explores the discourse of disaster and women in the existing social settings and state disaster-related affairs in coastal Bangladesh. It covers various issues ranging from disproportionate vulnerability, coping and adaptation mechanisms for women, limitations for promoting participation and involvement of women in the decision-making process both in family and community and changes in the role and responsibilities of women for reducing disaster risk and vulnerability. It contributes to the deconstruction of gender-based identity by addressing women's changing practices and roles in the coastal area in terms of the involvement of women with the development process, earning/income generation activities, decision-making process, access and entitlements to resources. This book presents the most current and inclusive circumstances of disaster and women of the coastal area in Bangladesh. The insights obtained through the eyes of a sociologist from a holistic perspective make this book different and unique. The book is of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers and professionals engaged in the social understanding of disaster studies, as well as to researchers and practitioners in interdisciplinary domains, including sociology, gender studies, social work, environmental studies, and development studies.

This book examines environmental and social justice challenges near America's most popular heritage attractions. These include over 100 places that host national parks (e.g., Glacier, Yellowstone), zoos (e.g., Bronx, Henry Doorly), urban parks (e.g., Central Park, Fairmount), grand concourses (e.g., 5th Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue), and multiple museums and galleries (e.g., National Gallery, Getty). The book includes measurements of demographics, air quality/distance from hazards, health outcomes, and urban assets in the areas immediately surrounding these heritage sites and compares them with adjacent areas and their host cities or states. It considers the history of justice-related-issues near the sites and evaluates what owners, managers and communities are doing to address gentrification, displacement, the legacy of redlining and other challenges, such as the animal rights movement, climate change/sustainability, and tight budgets. The book examines what some host cities are doing about affordable housing and what some heritage sites have done in establishing constructive relationships with surrounding communities. The book should have two primary audiences. One is the strong and growing social and environmental justice community that has increasingly been scrutinizing parks and other icons for evidence of injustice. This book will interest them, even though all the results do not necessarily support their positions. The second audience is businesses, not-for-profits, and government agencies who manage parks, zoos, museums, and other attractions and need to understand what is happening near their sites and what they can do to be better neighbours.

This book explores how equestrians are highly invested in the idea of profound connection between horse and human and focuses on the ethical problem of knowing horses. In describing how ‘true’ connection with horses matters, Rosalie Jones McVey investigates what sort of thing comes to count as a ‘good relationship’ and how riders work to get there. Drawing on fieldwork in the British horse world, she illuminates the ways in which equestrian culture instils the idea that horse people should know their horses better. Using horsemanship as one exemplary instance where ‘truth’ holds ethical traction, the book demonstrates the importance of epistemology in late modern ethical life. It also raises the question of whether, and how, the concept of truth should matter to multispecies ethnographers in their ethnographic representations of animals.

Will the European Union survive the global economic crisis? Will the Arab Spring trigger new forms of regional cooperation in North Africa? Will Asian regionalism prevail? This volume investigates the intimate relationship between regional governance processes and global crises. Starting with a thorough analysis of the so-called Eurocrisis and its impact on the European Union, the contributors look at how regional cooperation and integration in the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Latin America have been improved or challenged by local and global crises. Through a selection of topical studies dealing with economic, humanitarian and democratic crises, they discuss the future evolutions of regional governance and call for a new paradigm to put 'citizens' at the centre of regionalism.

Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world's most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived? Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. This book opens our eyes. Carbon colonialism explores the murky practices of outsourcing a country's environmental impact, where emissions and waste are exported from rich countries to poorer ones; a world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world's poorest countries continue to expand, and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth. Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, the book shows how this is not only a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our society. -- .

Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. Based on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England, this book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities. -- .

Following on from the ground-breaking first edition, which received the 2014 EDRA Achievement Award, this fully updated text includes new chapters on current issues in the built environment, such as GIS and mapping, climate change, and qualitative approaches. Place attachments are powerful emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. They inform our sense of identity, create meaning in our lives, facilitate community, and influence action. Place attachments have bearing on such diverse issues as rootedness and belonging, placemaking and displacement, mobility and migration, intergroup conflict, civic engagement, social housing and urban redevelopment, natural resource management, and global climate change. In this multidisciplinary book, Manzo and Devine-Wright draw together the latest thinking by leading scholars from around the globe, including contributions from scholars such as Daniel Williams, Mindy Fullilove, Randy Hester, and David Seamon, to capture significant advancements in three main areas: theory, methods, and applications. Over the course of fifteen chapters, using a wide range of conceptual and applied methods, the authors critically review and challenge contemporary knowledge, identify significant advances, and point to areas for future research. This important volume offers the most current understandings about place attachment, a critical concept for the environmental social sciences and placemaking professions.

This textbook helps students to understand the social, economic, and environmental importance of the mutual relations between industries in the same and in different regions and nations and demonstrates how to model these relations using regional, interregional, and international input-output (IO) models. It enables readers to extend these basic IO models with endogenous household expenditures, to employ supply-use tables (SUTs) that explicitly distinguish the products used and sold by industry, and to use social accounting matrices (SAMs) that detail the generation, redistribution and spending of income. In addition to the standard demand-driven IO quantity model and its accompanying cost-push IO price model, the book also discusses the economic assumptions and usefulness of the supply-driven IO quantity model and its accompanying revenue-pull IO price model. The final chapters highlight three main applications of the IO model: (1) economic impact analysis of negative supply shocks as caused by, for example, natural disasters, (2) linkages, key sector, and cluster analysis, (3) structural decomposition analysis, especially of regional, interregional, and international growth, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these IO applications. Written for graduate students of regional and spatial science as well as for economists and planners, this book provides a better understanding of the foundations, the power, the applicability and the limitations of input-output analysis. The second, completely revised edition expands on updating IO tables, modelling the disaster reconstruction phase, and includes an appendix on the necessary matrix algebra.

This book provides an institutional interpretation of state-facilitated gentrification in Chengdu, an emerging central city of China. It generalizes the three aspects of institutional changes in the cultural, economic and social spheres that have thus far directed the operation of gentrification in the transitional economy: the creative destruction of consumption spaces, the spatial production of excess, and the unequal redistribution of spatial resources to low-income residents. The interactions of state and society, are examined in navigating the institutional changes and forming the Chinese distinctions of gentrification. The author argues that these three aspects of institutional changes characterize gentrification in Chengdu as a transformative force of development led by the state and capitalists and championed by middle-class consumers. This gentrification mode periodically catalyzes new spaces and collective cultures, which then necessitate the stimulation of new consumption behaviors and the formation of new consumer classes, at the expense of the spatial demands for the even larger number of low-income residents. However, in the context of China's unique state-society relations, some low-income groups may also ride the wave of social transformation. The author suggests that this type of gentrification integrates into not the essence of uneven geographical development in a capitalist society, but China's unique model of urbanization and development, which is often state-driven, innovative and even involuted so as to sustain continuous growth. Though the research is focused on urban China, this book also contributes to methodological issues on gentrification research on a global scale. It is skeptical both of the structural explanation and of the revelation of unsorted differences; instead, it aims to generate midrange regularities of gentrification in Chinese cities. Institutional change is treated as an intermediary that, on the one hand, responds to the global trends and, on the other hand, adapts to local preconditions. Mixed methods, including statistical and spatial analysis, institutional analysis, and an extensive ethnographic study, are used to investigate gentrification from a structural perspective, a historical perspective, and as a grounded process within the locality.

This book brings together three distinct areas of International Law - namely Environmental, Heritage and Ocean Law - to address the international legal protection of historically significant wrecks, with particular focus on the environmental hazards they may pose. The confluence of Heritage Law and the Law of the Sea with International Environmental Law represents an important development in international governance strategies for the twenty-first century, in particular those legal and administrative regimes that concern the world's oceans and underwater cultural heritage protection. Importantly, connections between international legal regimes, such as the 1982 Law of the Sea, and institutions like the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and United Nations Education Scientific Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), can play a crucial part in governance strategies that involve the regulation of marine pollution and historic shipwrecks.

This textbook is a comprehensive introduction to applied spatial data analysis using R. Each chapter walks the reader through a different method, explaining how to interpret the results and what conclusions can be drawn. The author team showcases key topics, including unsupervised learning, causal inference, spatial weight matrices, spatial econometrics, heterogeneity and bootstrapping. It is accompanied by a suite of data and R code on Github to help readers practise techniques via replication and exercises. This text will be a valuable resource for advanced students of econometrics, spatial planning and regional science. It will also be suitable for researchers and data scientists working with spatial data.

Non-representational Theory explores a range of ideas which have recently engaged geographers and have led to the development of an alternative approach to the conception, practice, and production of geographic knowledge. Non-representational Theory refers to a key body of work that has emerged in geography over the past two and a half decades that emphasizes the importance of practice, embodiment, materiality, and process to the ongoing formation of social life. This title offers the first sole-authored, accessible introduction to this work and its impact on geography. Without being prescriptive the text provides a general explanation of what Non-representational Theory is. This includes discussion of the disciplinary context it emerged from, the key ideas and themes that characterise work associated with Non-representational Theory, and the theoretical points of reference that inspires it. The book then explores a series of conjunctions of 'Non-representational Theory and...', taking an area of geographic enquiry and exploring the impact Non-representational Theory has had on how it is researched and understood. This includes the relationships between Non-representational Theory and Practice, Affect, Materiality, Landscape, Performance, and Methods. Critiques of Non-representational Theory are also broached, including reflections on issues on identity, power, and difference. The text draws together the work of a range of established and emerging scholars working on the development of non-representational theories, allowing scholars from geography and other disciplines to access and assess the animating potential of such work. This volume is essential reading for undergraduates and post-graduate students interested in the social, cultural, and political geographies of everyday living.

This book offers a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to place attachment from a European perspective. Starting from a dynamic, relational, and participatory concept of place attachment, the book discusses place making and place attachment processes through place-based development and community place-driven actions. It also presents examples of creating place attachment through nature- and culture-based contexts and focuses on how sustainable planning and territorial identities enhance place attachment. Finally, this book presents and discusses (re)constructing place attachment within transition processes and through strategic solutions for urban recovery and regeneration of (post)-industrial areas. By considering the social, environmental, economic, and political effects of building, strengthening and maintaining place attachment, this book is a valuable read for all those working with and interested in learning more about place attachment: geographers, landscape planners, sociologists, psychologists, environmental and political scientists, and members of community movements.

Globalization is one of the buzz-words in the 1990s. It points to a world in which geographic location becomes increasingly irrelevant, a vision that has aroused both hopes and fears. Surprisingly, globalization is accompanied by increasing regionalization. This volume is a timely contribution to the debate on globalization and regionalism. Coming from several disciplines, its contributors explore the consequences of a world with no geographical barriers. Refuting simple notions of globalization, they argue that location and space will remain important dimensions of economic and social development. In view of this, the book develops a more balanced view of the tension between globalization and regionalism.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the Thai migrant community in Hong Kong between 2016 and 2020, this book provides original insights into the complexity and diversity of identity negotiation, ethnicity navigation, and womanhood reinvention of Thai migrant women in Hong Kong. Allowing research to move beyond standard stories of victimized migrants and domestic workers by focusing on the increasing number of Southeast Asians moving into the middle-class, this ethnographic study of the everyday lived experience of Thai migrant women in Hong Kong will advance a new understanding of transnational migration and mobility at the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, generation, and religion. This book illustrates the influence of transnationalism and multiculturalism on migrant women's meaning-making and accentuates the importance of diversity within a migrant population - in particular, the importance of maintaining an intersectional perspective to understand the broader phenomenon of contemporary middle-class and professional migration within Southeast Asia.

Neural networks as the commonly used machine learning algorithms, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been extensively used in the GIScience domain to explore the nonlinear and complex geographic phenomena. However, there are a few studies that investigate the parameter settings of neural networks in GIScience. Moreover, the model performance of neural networks often depends on the parameter setting for a given dataset. Meanwhile, adjusting the parameter configuration of neural networks will increase the overall running time. Therefore, an automated approach is necessary for addressing these limitations in current studies. This book proposes an automated spatially explicit hyperparameter optimization approach to identify optimal or near-optimal parameter settings for neural networks in the GIScience field. Also, the approach improves the computing performance at both model and computing levels. This book is written for researchers of the GIScience field as well as social science subjects.

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of how national and international efforts to achieve carbon neutrality have been embraced as necessary to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement as well as the needs of the planet. The authors explore the increasing tensions between aspirations and entrenched practices as methods to implement carbon neutrality are devised, particularly at the national and sub-national levels. This is perhaps best typified by efforts to shift from "dirty" energy production, such as coal, to greener alternatives, which are often supported in laws and rules but opposed by society. To bridge this void, the concept of just transitions has increasingly come to the forefront of international and national focus yet is often poorly understood. This book examines the ways in which just transitions have been proposed as a legal and regulatory bridge to address issues that result in societal resistance to implementation. It uses past and existing practice studies of just transitions before providing an analysis of how just transitions can be used to not only to assist in the shift to carbon neutrality but also in new shifts such as those caused by the Covid-19 pandemic impacts on economy, environment and society, and to address future global challenges.

This book explores the dynamics of the interaction between the development of creative industries and urban land use in Nanjing, a metropolis and a growth pole in the Yangtze River Delta. In the last two decades, China's economy has been undergoing dramatic growth. Yet, accompanying with China's economic success is the disturbing environmental deterioration and energy concerns. These issues together with the diminution of the advantage of low-cost labour force present many Chinese cities, particularly big cities specialising in manufacturing in the most developed regions, the urgency to find new approaches to "creative China". As an ancient city featured by abundance of cultural heritages and legacies of heavy industries, Nanjing has been striving for a decade to transform its economy towards a creative economy by cultivating creative industries. In parallel with the flourishing of creative industries are contest for land resources among different interest parties and restructuring of urban land use. Both are new challenges for urban planning. This complex process is examined in this book by an interdisciplinary approach which integrates GIS, ABM, questionnaire investigation and interview.

This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds. Small spaces have become big business. Reducing the size of our homes, and the amount of stuff within them, is increasingly sold as a catch-all solution to the stresses of modern life and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Shrinking living space is being repackaged in a neoliberal capitalist context as a lifestyle choice rather than the consequence of diminishing choice in the face of what has become a long-term housing 'crisis'. What does this mean for how we live in the long term, and is there a dark side to the promise of a simpler, more sustainable home life? Shrinking Domesticities brings together research from across the social sciences, planning and architecture to explore these issues. From co-living developments to the Tiny House Movement, self-storage units to practices of 'de-stuffification', and drawing on examples from across Europe, North America and Australasia, the authors of this volume seek to understand both what micro-living is bringing to our societies, and what it may be eroding.

Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a greater pace of reform to planning in Britain than at any other time. As a public sector activity, planning has also been impacted heavily by the wider changes in the way we are governed. Yet whilst such reform has been extensively commented upon within academia, few have empirically explored how these changes are manifesting themselves in planning practice. This new book aims to understand how both specific planning and broader public sector reforms have been experienced and understood by chartered town planners working in local authorities across Great Britain. After setting out the reform context, successive chapters then map responses across the profession to the implementation of spatial planning, to targets, to public participation and to the idea of a 'customer-focused' planning, and to attempts to change the culture of the planning. Each chapter outlines the reaction by the profession to reforms promoted by successive central and devolved governments over the last decade, before considering the broader issues of what this tells us about how modernisation is rolled-out by frontline public servants. This accessible book fills a gap in the market and makes ideal reading for students and researchers interested in the UK planning system.