Coastal Flood Risk Reduction: The Netherlands and the U.S. Upper Texas Coast represents the culmination of a 5-year international research and education partnership funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and more than 10 years of collaboration between Dutch and U.S. flood experts on the basic issue of how to protect society from growing flood risks. Multiple case studies integrating the fields of engineering, hydrology, landscape architecture, economics, and planning address the underlying characteristics of physical flood risks and their prediction; human communities and the associated built environment; physical, social, and built-environment variables; and mitigation techniques. In recognition of the lack of systematic research and the growing societal need to better understand flood impacts, this edited book provides an in-depth, comparative evaluation of flood problems and solutions in two key places: the Netherlands and the U.S. Upper Texas Coast. Both regions are extremely flood-prone and have experienced continual adverse impacts throughout their histories. For researchers in flood management, geographers, hydrologists, environmental studies, and social science as well as policymakers and decision-makers in flood management authorities and related industries, this book provides an essential resource.

As well as much-needed electricity, dams generate extremes of emotion. Traditionally, dams have facilitated hydraulic civilizations such as those in the Nile Valley, China and Mesopotamia, and, in the twentieth century, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Yet with the proliferation of dams there are now more than 40,000 large dams worldwide opposition and support can be measured in equal proportion. Their outstanding design and construction, often in inhospitable conditions, is representative of the skills of their engineers, yet others do not see such beauty in the taming' of rivers. In 1998 the continuing controversy led to the forming of the World Commission on Dams to seek a meeting of minds. "Dam", a new addition to Reaktion's "Objekt" series, traces the development of dams from the Industrial Revolution to the present day through a number of themes both successes and failures including the extension of the design teams forming an alliance between engineering, architecture, landscape architecture and ecology. A profusely illustrated exploration of a previously neglected subject, this book is neither a polemic against dams nor a defence of their proliferation.It offers a fresh and much-needed account of their design, construction and function, which will appeal to general readers and those interested in environmental policy, history and civil engineering.

Blue Dunes chronicles the design of artificial barrier islands developed to protect the Mid-Atlantic region of North America in the face of climate change. It narrates the complex, and sometimes contradictory, research agenda of an unlikely team of analysts, architects, ecologists, engineers, physicists, and planners addressing extreme weather and sea level rise within the practical limitations of science, politics, and economics.