This book examines interreligious dialogue from a European perspective. It features detailed case studies analysed from different disciplinary perspectives. These studies consider such activities as face-to-face discussion groups, public meetings, civic consultations with members of faith groups, and community action projects that bring together people from different faiths. Overall, the work reports on five years of qualitative empirical research gathered from different urban sites across four European cities (Hamburg, London, Stockholm, Oslo). It includes a comparative element which connects distinctive German, Scandinavian, and English experiences of the shared challenge of religious plurality. The contributors look at the issue through social, material, and ideological dimensions. They explore the following questions: Is interreligious dialogue the producer or product of social capital? What and how are different meanings produced and contested in places of interreligious activity? What is the function of religious thinking in different forms of interreligious activity? Their answers present a detailed analysis of the variety of practices on the ground. A firm empirical foundation supports their conclusions. Readers will learn about the changing nature of urban life through increasing pluralisation and the importance of interreligious relations in the current socio-political context. They will also gain a better understanding of the conditions, processes, function, and impact of interreligious engagement in community relations, public policy, urban planning, and practical theology.

This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair's respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London "psychogeographically" to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore's psychogeography consists of bird's-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd's aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair's conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London's disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize "London-ness" as estranging.

This book explores how environmental urban design can benefit from established and emerging representation and simulation techniques that meet the need for a multisensory approach. Bringing together contributions by researchers and practicing professionals that approach the topics discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives and draw on case-study applications, it addresses important themes including digital modeling, physical modeling, mapping, and simulation. The chapters are linked by their relevance to simple but crucial questions: How can representational solutions enhance an urban design approach in which people's well-being is considered the primary goal? How can one best represent and design the ambiance of places? What kinds of technologies and tools are available to support multisensory urban design? How can current and future environments be optimally represented and simulated, taking into account the way in which we experience places? Shedding new light on these key questions, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.

This book addresses the topic of urban models with reference to large western cities and particularly to global cities. In the current transitional phase, the use of language and the systematization of phenomena has become important. The book 's matrix examines two important and strongly connected themes: urban models and public-private partnerships (PPP) determined by urban functions which are transformed in an increasingly rapid and complex manner as a result of globalization. PPPs represent the new border of the modern global state. The book focuses on two principal urban models (renewal and restructuring) through PPPs and subsequently the relationship between state and market in fourteen Italian cities (renewal) and two central European cities, Leipzig and Budapest (restructuring). CoUrbIT (Complex Urban Investment Tools) and the book 'Globalization and Urban Implosion: Creating New Competitive Advantage' by the same author serve as points of reference.

This book explores the decline and growth of the private rental sector in Australia delving into the changing dynamics of landlord investment and tenant profile over the course of the twentieth century and into the present period. It explains why over one in four Australian households are now private renters and investigates the contemporary legal and regulatory frameworks governing the sector. The reform discourses in Australia and comparator countries, and debates around key concerns such as Australia's advantageous tax treatment of investors in rental property and the power imbalance between tenants and landlords are highlighted. The book draws on rich data: 600 surveys and close to 100 in-depth interviews with tenants in high, medium and low rent areas in Sydney and Melbourne and regional New South Wales. The book provides in-depth insights into this large and expanding component of Australia's housing market and shows how being a private renter shapes the everyday lives and wellbeing of people and households who rent their housing including short and long-term renters, those on low and higher incomes and older as well as younger people.

The title of this book, "Traditional Wisdom and Modern Knowledge for the Earth s Future," is from the theme of the 2013 Kyoto Regional Conference of the International Geographical Union. Over the past few decades, globalization has strengthened connections among countries and regions of the world and has greatly changed existing geographies. However, this trend has also fostered various problems on a regional or global scale, such as economic imbalance, social fragmentation, political conflicts, and environmental crises. While acknowledging the world s diversity, geography as a discipline must endeavor to resolve these problems by devising plans for cooperation and symbiotic existence of the different peoples of the world. An old Japanese proverb, "On-ko chi-shin," taken from a Chinese one, "Wengu Zhixin," says that only by exploring the old can one understand the new. People should first understand how traditional ideas, linked to interaction between society/culture and the environment, were formed in different countries and regions. Traditional wisdom, in harmony with the environment, remains prevalent. This book examines how we can mold the earth s future through such traditional wisdom and modern knowledge from the nine keynote speeches of the Kyoto Regional Conference focusing on three topics: traditional wisdom, the environment, and the Great East Japan Earthquake."

This book presents the latest research results related to urban center and urban center. It expounds the theoretical connotation, development models, hierarchical function, and spatial layout of the urban central structure through over 200 figures and tables. In addition, it analyzes the threshold characteristics, structural hierarchy, spatial characteristics, and development rules of urban central structure through field research and quantitative researches on the major urban central structures in Asia. Meanwhile, how to solve the issue of construction and layout of urban central structure in planning and design practice is also covered. The book reveals the laws and spatial characteristics of urban central structure and provides a valuable guide both for urban designers and planners as well as researchers and students working in urban design and planning fields. It sheds new light on better understanding of the urban central structure.

This book analyses the key livelihood and governance challenges that the urban poor experience while navigating public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using data collected through extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, the book contributes to the emerging scholarship of resilient cities, gendered space, spatial justice, and poverty in cities of the Global South. The book assesses the everyday politics of survival for the urban poor; how the poor negotiate different levels of formal and informal modes of power and governance; and the dynamics of gender. It explores how tenuous counterspaces are created when these factors combine to provide a valuable framework for work in other urban contexts in the Global South beyond Bangladesh. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives, this book investigates the issues of human development, urban governance, urban planning and the gendered nature of urban space to outline how these issues enable or constrain poor people's livelihood practices and their rights to be in the city. Exploring debates surrounding placemaking and inclusive cities and their connection to poor people's livelihoods, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Sociology, Development Studies, Planning, Geography and Anthropology.

Neighbourhood planning offers a critical analysis of community-based planning activity in England, framed within a broader view of collaborative rationality and its limits. From the recent experience of drawing up parish plans, and attempts to connect these to formal policy frameworks, it identifies lessons for future planning at the neighbourhood scale. It is not a manual on community planning practice, nor does it provide a formula for producing parish or neighbourhood plans. But in the context of the latest 'localism' agenda in England it, first, examines the potential contribution of neighbourhood planning to building a 'collaborative democracy' and, second, asks how much movement towards genuine local partnership, and consensus around development decisions, can be achieved through the rescaling of 'statutory' planning as opposed to expending greater effort locally on building stronger relationships, and generating trust, between 'people and planning'

This book dives into the mise-en-scene of contemporary China to explore the "becoming cinema" of Chinese cities, societies, and subjectivities. Set in the wake of China's radical and rapid period of urbanization and infrastructural transformation, and situating itself in the processual city of Ningbo, the book combines empirical, ficto-critical, and philosophical methods to generate a dynamic account of everyday life as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a Realist approach that allows for different scales of analysis, the book zooms in on five architectural assemblages including: surreal real estate showrooms; a fragmented history museum; China's "first and best" Sino-foreign university; a new "Old town"; and weird gamified "any-now(here)-spaces." Together these modern arrangements and machines for living cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up greater China.

This volume gathers a selection of research contributions on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), including theoretical and methodological studies and real-world case studies. It sheds new light on the respective steps in the procedure defined in the SEA Directive from theoretical and operational standpoints, intended to enhance the sustainability of plans and programmes adopted by local, regional and national authorities. Improving the legitimacy and transparency of decision-making in the field of environmental management was one of the goals that led the European Commission (EU) to adopt Directive 2001/42/EC on the assessment of environmental programmes' effects. This book provides a multidisciplinary approach to SEA, and addresses the demand for policies and strategies to strengthen resilience through concrete measures to reduce energy consumption, mitigate pollution, promote social inclusion and create urban identity.

This book strategically focuses upon the feasibility of positioning Indigenous Knowledge Systems into tertiary built environment education and research in Australia. Australian tertiary education has little engaged with Indigenous peoples and their Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and the respectful translation of their Indigenous Knowledge Systems into tertiary education learning. In contrast, while there has been a dearth of discussion and research on this topic pertaining to the tertiary sector, the secondary school sector has passionately pursued this topic. There is an uneasiness by the tertiary sector to engage in this realm, overwhelmed already by the imperatives of the Commonwealth's 'Closing the Gap' initiative to advance Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary education successes and appointments of Indigenous academics. As a consequence, the teaching of Indigenous Knowledge Systems relevant to professional disciplines, particularly landscape architecture where it is most apt, is overlooked and similarly little addressed in the relevant professional institute education accreditation standards.

This book brings together reports of original empirical studies which explore the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban mobility and transportation and the associated policy responses. Focusing on the California region, the book draws on this local experience to formulate general lessons for other regions and metropolitan areas. The book examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has had different impacts on vulnerable populations in cities. It explores the pandemic's impacts on the transportation industry, in particular public transit, but also on other industries and economic interests that rely on transportation, such as freight trucking, retail and food industries, and the gig-economy. It investigates the effect of the viral outbreak on automobile traffic and associated air quality and traffic safety, as well as on alternative forms of work, shopping, and travel which have developed to accommodate the conditions it has forced on society. With quantitative data supported with illustrations and graphs, transportation professionals, policymakers and students can use this book to learn about policies and strategies that may instigate positive change in urban transport in the post-pandemic period.

Energy Storage in Energy Markets reviews the modeling, design, analysis, optimization and impact of energy storage systems in energy markets in a way that is ideal for an audience of researchers and practitioners. The book provides deep insights on potential benefits and revenues, economic evaluation, investment challenges, risk analysis, technical requirements, and the impacts of energy storage integration. Heavily referenced and easily accessible to policymakers, developers, engineer, researchers and students alike, this comprehensive resource aims to fill the gap in the role of energy storage in pool/local energy/ancillary service markets and other multi-market commerce. Chapters elaborate on energy market fundamentals, operations, energy storage fundamentals, components, and the role and impact of storage systems on energy systems from different aspects, such as environmental, technical and economics, the role of storage devices in uncertainty handling in energy systems and their contributions in resiliency and reliability improvement.

Cities built on unconsolidated sediments consisting of clays, silt, peat, and sand, are particularly susceptible to subsidence. Such regions are common in delta areas, where rivers empty into the oceans, along flood plains adjacent to rivers, and in coastal marsh lands. Building cities in such areas aggravates the problem for several reasons:

1. Construction of buildings and streets adds weight to the region causing additional soil deformations.
2. Often the regions have to be drained in order to be occupied. This results in lowering of the water table and leads to hydro-compaction.
3. Often the groundwater is used as a source of water for both human consumption and industrial use.

4. Levees and dams are often built to prevent or control flooding.

Earth fissures caused by ground failure in areas of uneven or differential compaction have damaged buildings, roads and highways, railroads, flood-control structures and sewer lines. As emphasized by Barends, "in order to develop a legal framework to claims and litigation, it is essential that direct and indirect causes of land subsidence effects can be quantified with sufficient accuracy from a technical and scientific point of view."

Most existing methods and software applications treat the subsidence problem by analyzing one of the causes. This is due to the fact that the causes appear at different spatial scales. For example, over-pumping creates large scale subsidence, while building loading creates local subsidence/consolidation only.

Then, maximum permissible land subsidence (or consolidation) is a constraint in different management problems such as: groundwater management, planning of town and/or laws on building construction. It is, therefore, necessary to quantify the contribution of each cause to soil subsidence of the ground surface in cities urban area.

In this text book, we present an engineering approach based on the Biot system of equations to predict the soil settlement due to subsidence, resulting from different causes. Also we present a case study of The Bangkok Metropolitan Area (BMA).

This volume discusses recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in smart, internet-connected societies, highlighting three key focus areas. The first focus is on intelligent sensing applications. This section details the integration of Wireless Sensing Networks (WSN) and the use of intelligent platforms for WSN applications in urban infrastructures, and discusses AI techniques on hardware and software systems such as machine learning, pattern recognition, expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and intelligent control in transportation and communications systems. The second focus is on AI-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems, which addresses applications in traffic management, medical health, smart homes and energy. Readers will also learn about how AI can extract useful information from Big Data in IoT systems. The third focus is on crowdsourcing (CS) and computing for smart cities. this section discusses how CS via GPS devices, GIS tools, traffic cameras, smart cards, smart phones and road deceleration devices enables citizens to collect and share data to make cities smart, and how these data can be applied to address urban issues including pollution, traffic congestion, public safety and increased energy consumption. This book will of interest to academics, researchers and students studying AI, cloud computing, IoT and crowdsourcing in urban applications.

Recent global appropriations of public spaces through urban activism, public uprising, and political protest have brought back democratic values, beliefs, and practices that have been historically associated with cities. Given the aggressive commodification of public re- sources, public space is critically important due to its capacity to enable forms of public dis- course and social practice which are fundamental for the well-being of democratic societies. Public Space Reader brings together public space scholarship by a cross-disciplinary group of academics and specialists whose essays consider fundamental questions: What is public space and how does it manifest larger cultural, social, and political processes? How are public spaces designed, socially and materially produced, and managed? How does this impact the nature and character of public experience? What roles does it play in the struggles for the just city, and the Right to The City? What critical participatory approaches can be employed to create inclusive public spaces that respond to the diverse needs, desires, and aspirations of individuals and communities alike? What are the critical global and comparative perspectives on public space that can enable further scholarly and professional work? And, what are the futures of public space in the face of global pandemics, such as COVID-19? The readers of this volume will be rewarded with an impressive array of perspectives that are bound to expand critical understanding of public space.

The Future of Modular Architecture presents an unprecedented proposal for mass-customized mid- and high-rise modular housing that can be manufactured and distributed on a global scale. Advocating for the adoption of open-source design based on a new modular standard, the book shows how the construction industry and architectural practice may soon be radically reshaped. By leveraging the existing intermodal freight transport system, global supply chains can be harnessed to realize the long-held promise that housing will be a well-designed and affordable industrial product. We are on the cusp of a transformative change in the way we design and build our cities. Author David Wallance argues that modular architecture is profoundly intertwined with globalization, equitable urbanism, and sustainable development. His book addresses these timely issues through a specific approach grounded in fundamental concepts. Going beyond the individual modular building, Wallance forecasts the emergence of a new type of design, manufacturing, and construction enterprise. Written in an approachable style with illustrated examples, the book is a must read for professionals in architecture and design, city planning, construction, real estate, as well as the general reader with an interest in these topics.

This book highlights the latest advancements in the use of automated systems in the design, construction, operation and future of the built environment and its occupants. It considers how the use of automated decision-making frameworks, artificial intelligence and other technologies of automation are presently impacting the practice of architects, engineers, project managers and contractors, and articulates the near future changes to workflows, legal frameworks and the wider AEC industry. This book surveys and compiles the use of city apps, robots that operate buildings and fabricate structural elements, 3D printing, drones, sensors, algorithms, and advanced prefabricated modules. The book also contributes to the growing literature on smart cities, and explores the impacts on data privacy and data sovereignty that arise through the use of sensors, digital twins and intelligent transport systems. It provides a useful reference for further research and development in the area of automation in design and construction to architects, engineers, project managers, superintendents and construction lawyers, contractors, policy makers, and students.

This book celebrates the heritage of the distinctive Apatani community of the north-eastern Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh in India. It explores the fascinating indigenous knowledge of field and forest and a uniquely sustainable and enduring way of life that continues to evolve in the modern context. The book tells the story of how a material culture was shaped around bamboo and cane resources and nurtured by a strong community spirit and spirituality that transcended the human world and maintained an unbroken ethos of conservation through time It highlights the eco-sensitive lifestyle of this unique community and presents an in-depth analysis of the Apatani tradition of the exemplary use of natural resources. Through this engrossing detailed study, the author observes how bamboo houses are built in 3 days, fish cultivated in a rice field and a single river used to feed an entire community for millennia. She highlights the triumph of the human spirit in engineering a cultural landscape out of a swamp and how peaceful co-existence with nature can withstand the trials of time. Part autobiographical and powerfully personal, this book is a primer on sustainable living as practice. It will be of interest to researchers and students of tribal and Himalayan vernacular architecture, traditional bamboo-cane craft, urban ecology and geography, cultural studies, and sustainability. It will also attract general readership while being academically useful for anthropologists, sociologists, botanists, ecologists and environmentalists.

Dutch planning is widely known and admired for its ambitions and its achievements. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive description and analysis in English of its full range of policies and practices. It gives an up-to-date account of the principles - written and unwritten - behind the planning, and in addition shows how the practice sometimes ignores those principles in order to achieve better results. It describes the content of the policies, the measures taken to realise them, and the successes and failures. The book is not uncritical of Dutch land-use planning, but the author values its strengths and believes that planning in other countries could learn from them. These strengths arise in the continuing tension between the high ambitions of the Dutch planning, and the ingenuity and pragmatism exercised in order to realise those ambitions.

Smart Cities and the UN's SDGs explores how smart cities initiatives intersect with the global goal of making urbanization inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Topics explored include digital governance, e-democracy, health care access, public-private partnerships, well-being, and more. Examining smart cities concepts, tools, strategies, and obstacles and their applicability to sustainability, the book exposes key structural problems that cities face and how the imperative of sustainability can bypass them. It shows how smart city technological innovation can boost citizens' well-being, serving as a key reference for those seeking to make sense of the issues and challenges of smart cities and SDGs.

This book argues that the issues surrounding sustainable transport constitute a new - post-modern - phase in transport policy and management. Achieving sustainable transport requires more than 'optimal' management of congestion and the effects on public health and the environment. Assessments of external effects, and their optimal levels, tend to be piecemeal, localized, and focused on a specific type of effect. Sustainability, on the other hand, is a comprehensive, forward-looking concept that encompasses the achievement of a state of society that is better overall; it requires a widened concept of welfare that includes environmental quality and social justice in both the short and long term. This book is organized into three sections, each discussing a major set of challenges to the transition to a sustainable transport system.

This book examines place and place-making in London's Borough Market. In particular, it uses topo/graphy ('place-writing) to interrogate the ways in which Borough Market's material, social-sensual and discursive relations assemble to reproduce Borough Market as a place, market and marketplace. Its central premise is that market-processes - the negotiation and exchange of commodities -are place-processes. This means that the often-abstract relationships that ultimately define what we think of as the economy are embedded in the rich and every materiality, sociality, sensuality and meanings associated with place. By tracing out these different elements, topo/graphy illustrates the ways in which economic reproduction is grounded in particular and often discrete practices. However, by assembling them together, this highlights the ways in which place and place-making are the driving force behind the economy at large.

This book provides crucial insight into the fight back against austerity by local authorities through emerging forms of municipal entrepreneurialism in housing delivery. Capturing this moment within its live context, the authors examine the ways that local authorities are moving towards increased financial independence based on their own activities to implement new forms and means of housebuilding activity. They assess these changes in the context of the long-term relationship between local and central government and argue that contemporary local authority housing initiatives represent a critical turning point, whilst also providing new ways of thinking about meting housing need.