This book presents a detailed exploration into the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), an enterprise concerned with finding and communicating sustainable ways of living, established in Wales in 1973. Playing a central role in the global green network, this study examines CAT's history and context for creation, its development over time and its wider influence in the progression of green ideas at the local, national and international levels. Based on original archival and ethnographic research, this book provides the first in-depth analysis of CAT and uses the case study to explore wider issues of sustainability and environmental communication. It situates the Centre within current environmental and political discourse and emphasises the relevance and reach of CAT's practical solutions and creative educational programme. These practical solutions to the destruction of the environment of human activity are increasingly vital in today's context of climate change, loss of biodiversity and rising levels of pollution. It debates the spectrum of attitudes between environmentalism and ecologism evident at CAT and in broader conversations surrounding sustainability. Woven throughout the text, the author makes clear what we can learn from CAT's almost 50 years of experiments and experiences, from his first-hand account of working at the site. This will be a fascinating and revealing read for academics, researchers, students and practitioners interested in all aspects of sustainability and environmental issues.

Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.

The book combines an extensive review of art actions, classifying and anchoring them in contemporary urban theories. It reviews trends and describes numerous art projects in the public space, and is interspersed with multiple photographs, hence it may be attractive to any reader who wishes to become involved in his community and urban environment.

This book works with two contrasting imaginings of 1960s London: the one of the excess and comic vacuousness of Swinging London, the other of the radical and experimental cultural politics generated by the city's counterculture. The connections between these two scenes are mapped looking firstly at the spectacular events that shaped post-war London, then at the modernist physical and social reconstruction of the city alongside artistic experiments such as Pop and Op Art. Making extensive use of London's underground press the book then explores the replacement of this seemingly materialistic image with the counterculture of underground London from the mid-1960s. Swinging City develops the argument that these disparate threads cohere around a shared cosmology associated with a new understanding of nature which differently positioned humanity and technology. The book tracks a moment in the historical geography of London during which the city asserts itself as a post-imperial global city. Swinging London it argues, emerged as the product of this recapitalisation, by absorbing avant-garde developments from the provinces and a range of transnational, mainly transatlantic, influences.

Design Strategies for Reimagining the City is situated between projective geometry, optical science and architectural design. It draws together seemingly unrelated fields in a series of new digital design tools and techniques underpinned by tested prototypes. The book reveals how the relationship between architectural design and the ubiquitous urban camera can be used to question established structures of control and ownership inherent within the visual model of the Western canon. Using key moments from the broad trajectory of historical and contemporary representational mechanisms and techniques, it describes the image's impact on city form from the inception of linear perspective geometry to the digital turn. The discussion draws upon combined fields of digital geometry, the pictorial adaptation of human optical cues of colour brightness and shape, and modern image-capture technology (webcams, mobile phones and UAVs) to demonstrate how the permeation of contemporary urban space by digital networks calls for new architectural design tools and techniques. A series of speculative drawings and architectural interventions that apply the new design tools and techniques complete the book. Aimed at researchers, academics and upper-level students in digital design and theory, it makes a timely contribution to the ongoing and broadly debated relationship between representation and architecture.

Taking both a retrospective and prospective view of the management of cultural heritage in the region, this volume argues that the plurality and complexity of heritage in the region cannot be comprehensively understood and effectively managed without a broader conceptual framework like the cultural landscape approach. The book also demonstrates that such an approach facilitates the development of a flexible strategy for heritage conservation. Acknowledging the effects of rapid socio-economic development, globalization and climate change, contributors examine the pressure these issues place on the sustenance of cultural heritage. Including chapters from more than 20 countries across the Asia-Pacific region, the volume reviews the effectiveness of theoretical and practical potentials afforded by the cultural landscape approach and examines how they have been utilized in the Asia-Pacific context for the last three decades. The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Landscape Heritage in the Asia-Pacific provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes of cultural landscape heritage conservation and management. As a result, it will be of interest to academics, students and professionals who are based in the fields of cultural heritage management, architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, and landscape management.

In 2019, mobility experts Melissa and Chris Bruntlett began a new adventure in Delft in the Netherlands. They had packed up their family in Vancouver, BC, and moved to Delft to experience the cycling city as residents rather than as visitors. A year earlier they had become unofficial ambassadors for Dutch cities with the publication of their first book Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality. In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people. In the planning field, little attention is given to the effects that a “low-car” city can have on the human experience at a psychological and sociological level. Studies are beginning to surface that indicate the impact that external factors, such as sound, can have on our stress and anxiety levels. Or how the systematic dismantling of freedom and autonomy for children and the elderly to travel through their cities is causing isolation and dependency. In Curbing Traffic, the Bruntletts explain why these investments in improving the built environment are about more than just getting from place to place more easily and comfortably. The insights will help decision makers and advocates to better understand and communicate the human impacts of low-car cities: lower anxiety and stress, increased independence, social autonomy, inclusion, and improved mental and physical wellbeing. The book is organised around the benefits that result from thoughtfully curbing traffic, resulting in a city that is: child-friendly, connected, trusting, feminist, quiet, therapeutic, accessible, prosperous, resilient, and age-friendly. Planners, public officials, and citizen activists should have a greater understanding of the consequences that building for cars has had on communities (of all sizes). Curbing Traffic provides relatable, emotional, and personal reasons why it matters and inspiration for exporting the low-car city.

Recent years have seen a gathering interest in the importance of real estate development to the growth and development of cities. This has included theoretical work on such topics as land rent and property rights as well as empirical studies on property investments, assetization, securitization, and the effects of changing property values on economic growth and the global status of cities. In the field of urban political economy, attention has turned particularly to the financialization of land and the built environment and to the globalization of property ownership, real estate development, and architectural design. This edited volume brings together a collection of original investigations of the current thinking on three broad themes: the assetization of land and buildings, the relationship of land rent to valuation and speculation in the markets for private and public properties, and the different ways in which land functions as a social relation. In order to ground the discussion, each chapter combines a theoretical perspective with empirical evidence. And, to convey a sense of the global nature of these phenomena, the book includes cases from Finland, India, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Italy, China, and the United States. Although its prime goal is to solidify and extend the political economy of land, this book is also a celebration of the Finnish scholar Anne Haila who was a major contributor to this literature and, specifically, to the work of this book's authors. Prior to her sudden death in 2019, she was a key figure in the discussions that are at the core of the political economy of land: this book, in part, is a public acknowledgement of her contributions.

--The book will cover basic and advanced computational and parametric modeling methods as a starting point for the following chapters. This can serve many undergraduate courses that focus on both introductory and advanced computational modeling by establishing best practices and workflow for more advanced operations and calculations. The advanced topics of ecosystem services and landscape performance covered in later chapters of the book can serve both upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate students for courses that focus on grading and drainage, stormwater management, and system thinking. --Guides readers on evaluating performance in both the natural and built environment, which is a professional standard for accredited programs and is necessary for Sustainable Sites and L.E.E.D. certifications. --In the introductory chapters of the book, references to external resources will be provided as they relate to climate, soil, and topographic data so that the user is not limited to the example's region and context.

Architects habitually disregard disciplinary boundaries of their profession in search for synergies and inspiration. The realm of language, although not considered to be architects' natural environment, opens opportunities to further stretch and expand the architectural imagination and the set of tools used in the design process. When used in the context of architectural pedagogy, the exploration of the relationship between space and language opens the discussion further to include the reflection on the design studio structure, the learning process in creative subjects and the ethical dimension of architectural education. This book offers a glimpse into architectural pedagogies exploring the relationship between space and language, using literary methods and linguistic experiments. The examples discuss a wide range of approaches from international perspective, exploring opportunities and challenges of engaging literary methods and linguistic experiments in architectural education. The theme of Catalysts discusses the use of literary methods in architectural pedagogy, where literary texts are used to jumpstart and support the design process, resulting in deeply contextual approaches capable of subverting embedded hierarchies of the design studio. Tensions explore the gap between the world and its description, employing linguistic experiments and literary methods to enrich and expand the architectural vocabulary to include the experience of space in its infinite complexity. This book will be useful for innovators in architectural education and those seeking to expand their teaching practice to incorporate literary methods, and to creatives interested in making teaching a part of their practice. It may also appeal to students from design-based disciplines with an established design studio culture, demonstrating how to use narrative, poetry and literature to expand and feed your imagination.

From the cross-disciplinary perspective of urban management and planning, geography and architecture, this book explores the theory and methods of urban memory, selecting Beijing's historic buildings, historic areas, central areas and city walls as research cases. It is divided into three parts: factors analysis, modeling and practical application. It lays a scientific foundation and provides practical methods for the management of historical spaces, residents' and commercial activities, optimizing the layout and structure of the historic spaces, updating the protection of old buildings, promoting the organic growth of historic sites and the sustainable development of urbanization with new concepts.

The grove, a grouping of trees, intentionally cultivated or found growing wild, has a long diverse history entwined with human settlement, rural practices and the culture and politics of cities. A grove can be a memorial, a place of learning, a site of poetic retreat and philosophy or political encampment, a public park or theatre, a place of hidden pleasures, a symbol of a vanished forest ecology, or a place of gods or other spirits. Yet groves are largely absent from our contemporary vocabulary and rarely included in today's landscape practice, whether urban or rural. Groves are both literal and metaphorical manifestations, ways of defining spaces and ecologies in our cultural life. Since they can add meaning to urban forms and ecologies and contribute meaningfully to the significance of place, critical examination is long overdue. The editors have taken care to ensure that the text is accessible to the general reader as well as specialists.

River Cities in Asia uncovers the intimate relationship between rivers and cities in Asia from a multi-disciplinary perspective in the humanities and the social sciences. As rivers have shaped human settlement patterns, economies, culture and rituals, so too have humans impacted the flow and health of rivers. In Asia, the sheer scale of urbanization increases the urgency of addressing challenges facing urban rivers, leading to the importance of historically, socially, and culturally relevant solutions. However, cities are also uneven landscapes of power, affecting chances to achieve holistic ecological approaches. The central premise of River Cities in Asia is that a "river city" is one where proximity between a river and a city exists across time and space, natural and social dimensions. Recognition of these deep connections can help to better contextualize policy solutions aimed at rivers and their ecologies, including human life.

During the years 1919 into 1925 Frank Lloyd Wright worked on four houses and a kindergarten located in metropolitan Los Angeles using concrete blocks as the main building material. The construction system has been described by Wright and others as 'uniquely molded', 'woven like a textile fabric' and perceived as ground breaking, truly modern, unprecedented. Many have attempted to uphold these claims while some thought the house-designs borrowed from old exotic buildings. For the first time this book brings together Wright's declarations, the support of upholders and inferences in order to determine their accuracy and correctness, or the possibility of feigned or fictional stories. It examines technical developments of concrete blocks by Wright and others before his experiences in Los Angeles began in 1919. It also studies the manner of Wright's design process by an examination of relevant pictorial and textual documents. A unique, in-depth and critical analysis of the houses is set within historical, biographical and theoretical contexts. Consequently, the book explains the impact upon Wright of California contemporaries, architects Irving Gill and Rudolph Schindler, and their instrumentally profound role upon the course of modernism 1907-1923. In doing so, it allows a full appreciation of Wright's, Gill's and Schindler's buildings beyond their experiential qualities.

The past few decades have seen universities take on a leading role in urban development, actively providing public services beyond teaching and research. The relationship between the university and the city has great influence on the space of university, which is vividly reflected in the process of university spatial development. This process has been particularly evident in China as Chinese universities and cities have been undergoing dramatic transformations since reform in the late 1970s. University Spatial Development and Urban Transformation in China explores the changing relationship between the university and the city from a spatial perspective. Based on theories and discourses on the production of space, the book analyzes case studies in university spatial development in China at three scales - global, national and local - covering social and urban contexts, the urban transformation, interactions in the development process and the changing dynamic between university and city to propose mutually beneficial planning strategies. This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and urban planners in identifying the key factors and relationships in university spatial development using theoretical and empirical data to guide future urban planning.

The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People is a thorough and practical resource for all who wish to influence policy and design decisions in order to increase young people's access to and use of public spaces, as well as their role in design and decision-making processes. The ability of youth to freely enjoy public spaces, and to develop a sense of belonging and attachment to these environments, is critical for their physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Young people represent a vital citizen group with legitimate rights to occupy and shape their public environments, yet they are often driven out of public places by adult users, restrictive bylaws, or hostile designs. It is also important that children and youth have the opportunity to genuinely participate in the planning of public spaces, and to have their needs considered in the design of the public realm. This book provides both evidence and tools to help effectively advocate for more youth-inclusive public environments, as well as integrate youth directly into both research and design processes related to the public realm. It is essential reading for researchers, design and planning professionals, community leaders, and youth advocates.

Written by a leading instructor, it focuses on accessible methods and concepts to introduce active, rather than passive, photography to students, instructors and practitioners in the fields of landscape, planning, architecture and environmental design Provides clear guidance on a diverse set of approaches and explores deeper discussions about making and using photography in environmental design, along with further reading It covers techniques to build on such as casual composition, constraints, slowing down, investigating, non-visual cues, POV, narrative and detachment that encourage enhanced visual focus Includes 190 full colour images, with examples by the author and invited contributors from practice.

Wildness and Wellbeing explores the dynamic relationships between urban nature and mental health, offering practical strategies for urban design. Mental health is a leading global issue and our urban environments can contribute to conditions such as depression and anxiety. Presenting the latest research, this book explores how neuroscience can offer new perspectives on the crucial role everyday multisensory interactions with nature can have on our mental wellbeing. These insights can help us (un)design our streets, neighbourhoods and cities, allowing nature to be integrated back into our cities. Wildness and Wellbeing is for anyone interested in the connections between urban ecology, health, environmental science, planning, and urban design, helping to create biodiverse cities for mental health.

Gentrification is one of the most debilitating-and least understood-issues in American cities today. Scholars and community activists adjoin in Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures to engage directly and critically with the issue of gentrification and to address its impacts on marginalized, materially exploited, and displaced communities. Authors in this collection begin to unpack and explore the forces that underlie these significant changes in an area's social character and spatial landscape. Central in their analyses is an emphasis on racial formations and class relations, as they each look to find the essence of the urban condition through processes of demographic change, economic restructuring, and gentrification. Their original findings locate gentrification within a carefully integrated theoretical and political framework and challenge readers to look critically at the present and future of gentrification studies. Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures is a vital read for scholars and researchers, as well as planners and organizers hoping to understand the contemporary changes happening in our urban areas.

This book critically examines 'smart city' discourse in terms of governance initiatives, citizen participation and policies which place emphasis on the 'citizen' as an active recipient and co-producer of technological solutions to urban problems. The current hype around smart cities and digital technologies has sparked debates in the fields of citizenship, urban studies and planning surrounding the rights and ethics of participation. It also sparked debates around the forms of governance these technologies actively foster. This book presents new socio-technological systems of governance that monitor citizen power, trust-building strategies, and social capital. It calls for new data economics and digital rights for a city founded on normative ideals rather than neoliberal ones. It adopts a normative approach arguing that a 'reloaded' smart city should foster citizenship as a new set of civil and social rights and the 'citizen' as a subject vested with active and meaningful forms of participation and political power. Ultimately, the book questions the utility of the 'smart city' project for radical municipalism, proposing a technological enough but more democratic city, an 'intelligent city' in fact. Offering useful contribution to smart city initiatives for the protection of emerging digital citizenship rights and socially accrued benefits, this book will draw the interest of researchers, policymakers, and professionals in the fields of urban studies, urban planning, urban geography, computing and technology studies, urban politics and urban economics.

This text explores how architectural and urban design values have been co-opted by global cities to enhance their economic competitiveness by creating a superior built environment that is not just aesthetically memorable but more productive and sustainable. It focuses on the experience of central Sydney through its policy commitment to 'design excellence' and more particularly to mandatory competitive design processes for major private development. Framed within broader contexts that link it to comparable urban policy and design issues in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, it provides a scholarly but accessible volume that provides a balanced and critical overview of a policy that has changed the design culture, development expectations, public realm and skyline of central Sydney, raising issues surrounding the uneven distribution of benefits and costs, professional practice, representative democracy, and implications of globalization.

This volume offers a critical and complicated picture of how leisure tourism connected the world after the World War II, transforming coastal lands, traditional societies, and national economies in new ways. The 21 chapters in this book analyze selected case studies of architectures and landscapes around the world, contextualizing them within economic geographies of national development, the geopolitics of the Cold War, the legacies of colonialism, and the international dynamics of decolonization. Postwar leisure tourism evokes a rich array of architectural spaces and altered coastal landscapes, which is explored in this collection through discussions of tourism developments in the Mediterranean littoral, such as Greece, Turkey, and southern France, as well as compelling analyses of Soviet bloc seaside resorts along the Black Sea and Baltic coasts, and in beachscapes and tourism architectures of western and eastern hemispheres, from Southern California to Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Egypt. This collection makes a compelling argument that "leisurescapes," far from being supra-ideological and apolitical spatial expressions of modernization, development, and progress, have often concealed histories of conflict, violence, social inequalities, and environmental degradation. It will be of interest to architectural and urban historians, architects and planners, as well as urban geographers, economic and environmental historians.

This book explores the link between the Food-Water-Energy nexus and sustainability, and the extraordinary value that small tweaks to this nexus can achieve for more resilient cities and communities. Using data from Urban Living Labs in six participating cities (Eindhoven, Gdansk, Miami, Southend-on-Sea, Taipei, and Uppsala) to co-define context-specific challenges, the results from each city are collated into an Integrated Decision Support System to guide and improve robust decision-making on future urban development. The book presents contributions from CRUNCH, a transdisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners whose expertise spans urban climate modelling; food, water, and energy management; the design of resilient public space; collecting better urban data; and the development of smart city technology. Whilst previous works on the Food-Water-Energy nexus have focused on large, transnational cases, this book explores local ways to use the Food-Water-Energy nexus to improve urban resilience. It suggests tangible ways in which the cities and communities around us can become both more efficient and more climate resilient through small changes to their existing infrastructure. Over half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and this is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. We urgently need to make our cities more resilient. This book provides a planning tool for decision-making and concludes with policy recommendations, making it relevant to a range of audiences including urbanists, environmentalists, architects, urban designers, and city planners, as well as students and scholars interested in alternative approaches to sustainability and resilience.

Rethinking Wilderness and the Wild: Conflict, Conservation and Co-existence examines the complexities surrounding the concept of wilderness. Contemporary wilderness scholarship has tended to fall into two categories: the so-called 'fortress conservation' and 'co-existence' schools of thought. This book, contending that this polarisation has led to a silencing and concealment of alternative perspectives and lines of enquiry, extends beyond these confines and in particular steers away from the dilemmas of paradise or paradox in order to advance an intellectual and policy agenda of plurality and diversity rather than of prescription and definition. Drawing on case studies from Australia, Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the United States and Iceland, and explorations of embodied experience, creative practice, philosophy, and First Nations land management approaches, the assembled chapters examine wilderness ideals, conflicts and human-nature dualities afresh, and examine co-existence and conservation in the Anthropocene in diverse ontological and multidisciplinary ways. By demonstrating a strong commitment to respecting the knowledge and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, this work delivers a more nuanced, ethical and decolonising approach to issues arising from relationships with wilderness. Such a collection is immediately appropriate given the political challenges and social complexities of our time, and the mounting threats to life across the globe. The abiding and uniting logic of the book is to offer a unique and innovative contribution to engender transformations of wilderness scholarship, activism and conservation policy. This text refutes the inherent privileging and exclusionary tactics of dominant modes of enquiry that too often serve to silence non-human and contrary positions. It reveals a multi-faceted and contingent wilderness alive with agency, diversity and possibility. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of conservation, environmental and natural resource management, Indigenous studies and environmental policy and planning. It will also be of interest to practitioners, policymakers and NGOs involved in conservation, protected environments and environmental governance.

In a series of essays, the process of "urbanisation" - a human mega-trend acquiring unprecedented scale and speed as globalisation proceeds - is examined in the most diverse contexts and stages of development. Drawing on scientific references and identifying recurring themes like "dispersion," "privatisation" and "vitality," Fiedler devises the glossary for a cross-cultural understanding of the global urban system emerging. Images and anecdotal evidence reconnect these themes to local realities. The tone of the essays conveys a post-voluntarist attitude, derived from many years of professional experience - critical of both neoliberal practices and determinist ideas.

"To "condemn the reality" of global urbanization "is fruitless," writes Johannes Fiedler in this unlimited view of a world of constant motion, subject no longer to just its planetary rotations, but also to the constant push and pull of its various populations, some of whose giant constructions shift the earth's axis."

From the foreword by Lars Lerup