Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a historically grounded comparative study to examine the form, trajectory, and contradictions of redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the world. This approach, which Gotham and Greenberg term crisis driven urbanization, emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid and resources, the devolution of disaster recovery responsibilities to the local state, and the use of generous tax incentives to bolster revitalization. Crisis driven urbanization also involves global branding campaigns and public media events to repair a city's image for business and tourism, as well as internally-focused political campaigns and events that associate post-crisis political leaders and public-private partnerships with this revitalized urban image. By focusing on past and present conditions in New York and New Orleans, Gotham and Greenberg show how crises expose long-neglected injustices, underlying power structures, and social inequalities. In doing so, they reveal the impact of specific policy reforms, public-private actions, and socio-legal regulatory strategies on the creation and reproduction of risk and vulnerability to disasters. Crisis Cities questions the widespread narrative of resilience and reveals the uneven and contradictory effects of redevelopment activities in the two cities.

This book is the first coherent quantified assessment of the economy of the Roman Empire. George Maher argues inventively and rigorously for a much higher level of growth and prosperity than has hitherto been imagined, and also explains why, nonetheless, the Roman Empire did not achieve the transition which began in Georgian Britain. This book will have an enormous impact on Roman history and be required reading for all teachers and students in the field. It will also interest and provoke historians of the medieval and early modern periods into wondering why their economies failed to match the Roman level. Part of the problem in assessing the Roman economy is that we do not have much in the way of numerical data, but Roman historians, who rarely have much statistical expertise, have not always recognised the potential of the data we do have. Dr Maher's reassessment of the economy of the Roman Empire has to use the same data as everyone else, but he is able to draw strikingly novel conclusions in two ways: first, by more statistically sophisticated use of a few crucial datasets and, second, by correlating and drawing a coherent picture across the whole economy. On grain yields, firstly, instead of getting bogged down in details of individual cases, George Maher shows how there is a remarkably consistent pattern from which outliers can be excluded, showing yields were much higher than normally assumed. He then demonstrates that high yields are in fact necessary to explain the exceptional urbanization of the Empire. Urbanization at this level in turn, as George Maher shows, has implications for consumption and commerce. He takes this further to show how high levels of trade imply high levels of sophistication in economic practices and mentality. In one of his most methodologically novel chapters, George Maher develops a new and simpler way of assessing average life expectancy and argues for a life expectancy almost double the traditional view. This book, Dr George Maher's doctoral thesis, is the theoretical underpinning of his book Pugnare: Economic Success and Failure.

With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other "disorderly" people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and public safety, many cities have wholeheartedly embraced "zero-tolerance" or "broken window" policing efforts to clear the streets of unwanted people. Through an almost completely unnoticed set of practices, these people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return-effectively banished from public places.
Banished is the first exploration of these new tactics that dramatically enhance the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, the authors chart the rise of banishment in Seattle, a city on the leading edge of this emerging trend, to establish how it works and explore its ramifications. They demonstrate that, although the practice allows police and public officials to appear responsive to concerns about urban disorder, it is a highly questionable policy: it is expensive, does not reduce crime, and does not address the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Moreover, interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives and their path to self-sufficiency immeasurably more difficult.
At a time when more and more cities and governments in the U.S. and Europe resort to the criminal justice system to solve complex social problems, Banished provides a vital and timely challenge to exclusionary strategies that diminish the life circumstances and rights of those it targets.

Music Downtown Eastside draws on two decades of research in one of North America's poorest urban areas to illustrate how human rights can be promoted through music. Harrison's examination of how gentrification, grant funding, and community organizations affect the success or failure of human rights-focused musical initiatives offers insights into the complex relationship between culture, poverty, and human rights that have global implications and applicability. The book takes the reader into popular music jams and music therapy sessions offered to the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. Harrison analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and musical moments where human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated. The book offers insights on the relationship between music and poverty, a social deprivation that diminishes capabilities and rights. It contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices and policy.

Green Blockchain Technology for Sustainable Smart Cities presents a detailed exploration of the adaptation and implementation of green blockchain technology for sustainable and eco-friendly smart city applications. This book covers all aspects of the topic and explores smart cities ecosystem applications of blockchain technology. Novel architectural and business blockchain use case solutions in smart city implementations are at the core of this book, which will be beneficial for all researchers, engineers, graduate students, smart city practitioners, and city administrators who are engaged in green blockchain and smart cities-related technologies.

Equity is the tool to achieve diversity and inclusion that will help eliminate injustice and fairly distribute the benefits of an equitable environment to everyone. Corporate culture around the world has already stated efforts for sustainable development through corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in rural areas. This infrastructure must be strengthened so that the rural community can become an active part of changing the world of work. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts of Businesses in Rural Areas evaluates growth trajectories and educational opportunities in rural areas. It further explores the inclusion efforts of marginalized groups in rural society. Covering topics such as the construction industry, rural populations, and workplace inclusivity, this premier reference source is a valuable resource for policymakers, investors, professionals, business leaders and managers, economists, sociologists, students and educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

The importance of citywide festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for the LGBTQ community Festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta have come to be annual events in which entire cities participate, and LGBTQ people are a visible part of these celebrations. In other words, the party is on, the party is queer, and everyone is invited. In Queer Carnival, Amy Stone takes us inside these colorful, eye-catching, and often raucous events, highlighting their importance to queer life in America's urban South and Southwest. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile. Queer Carnival provides an important new perspective on queer life in the South and Southwest, showing us the ways that LGBTQ communities not only survive, but thrive, even in the most unexpected places.

How LGBTQ community life in a small Midwestern city differs from that in larger cities with established gayborhoods River City is a small, Midwestern, postindustrial city surrounded by green hills and farmland with a population of just over 50,000. Most River City residents are white, working-class Catholics, a demographic associated with conservative sexual politics. Yet LGBTQ residents of River City describe it as a progressive, welcoming, and safe space, with active LGBTQ youth groups and regular drag shows that test the capacity of bars. In this compelling examination of LGBTQ communities in seemingly "unfriendly" places, Queering the Midwest highlights the ambivalence of LGBTQ lives in the rural Midwest, where LGBTQ organizations and events occur occasionally but are generally not grounded in long-standing LGBTQ institutions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, Clare Forstie offers the story of a community that does not fit neatly into a narrative of progress or decline. Rather, this book reveals the contradictions of River City's LGBTQ community, where people feel both safe and unnoticed, have a sense of belonging and persistent marginalization, and have friendships that do and don't matter. These "ambivalent communities" in small Midwestern cities challenge the ways we think about LGBTQ communities and relationships and push us to embrace the contradictions, failures, and possibilities of LGBTQ communities across the American Midwest.

In nineteenth-century Toronto, people took to the streets to express their jubilation on special occasions, such as the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales and the return in 1885 of the local Volunteers who helped to suppress the Riel resistance in the North-West. In a contrasting mood, people also took to the streets in anger to object to government measures, such as the Rebellion Losses bill, to heckle rival candidates in provincial election campaigns, to assert their ethno-religious differences, and to support striking workers. Expressive Acts examines instances of both celebration and protest when Torontonians publicly displayed their allegiances, politics, and values. The book illustrates not just the Victorian city's vibrant public life but also the intense social tensions and cultural differences within the city. Drawing from journalists' accounts in newspapers, Expressive Acts illuminates what drove Torontonians to claim public space, where their passions lay, and how they gave expression to them.

The birth of the world's great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the "urban age" inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world's urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities. Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City's turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of "the right to the city," the establishment and contestation of a "postpolitical" governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of "political reform" by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state. A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the "urban age" even beyond Mexico City.

Focusing on different tools, platforms, and techniques, Blockchain and the Smart City: Infrastructure and Implementation uses case studies from around the world to examine blockchain deployment in diverse smart city applications. The book begins by examining the fundamental theories and concepts of blockchain. It looks at key smart cities' domains such as banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain management. It examines Using case studies for each domain, the book looks at payment mechanisms, fog/edge computing, green computing, and algorithms and consensus mechanisms for smart cities implementation. It looks at tools such as Hyperledger, Etherium, Corda, IBM Blockchain, Hydrachain, as well as policies and regulatory standards, applications, solutions, and methodologies. While exploring future blockchain ecosystems for smart and sustainable city life, the book concludes with the research challenges and opportunities academics, researchers, and companies in implementing blockchain applications.

Between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian Americans in Los Angeles moved toward becoming a racial majority in the communities of the East San Gabriel Valley. By the late 1990s, their "model minority" status resulted in greater influence in local culture, neighborhood politics, and policies regarding the use of suburban space. In the "country living" subdivisions, which featured symbols of Western agrarianism including horse trails, ranch fencing, and Spanish colonial architecture, white homeowners encouraged assimilation and enacted policies suppressing unwanted "changes"-that is, increased density and influence of Asian culture. While some Asian suburbanites challenged whites' concerns, many others did not. Rather, white critics found support from affluent Asian homeowners who also wished to protect their class privilege and suburbia's conservative Anglocentric milieu. In Resisting Change in Suburbia, award-winning historian James Zarsadiaz explains how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging.

Describes the development of one of the first cohousing communities in the U.S. offering a social understanding of its commons. Cohousing, a form of communal living that clusters around shared common space, began about a half century ago in Denmark. We Built a Village describes the process of planning and building of an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the way the people involved simultaneously built their homes and their social structure. As both a memoir and a sociological analysis that probes the differences between commons and markets, it is unique among books about cohousing. When this group of people began in the late 1990s to construct their cohousing community, they set in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together, even up to creative responses to the recent pandemic.

In Becoming Citizens in China, Shi Yunqing describes the two interlinked histories that have made China's urban and economic miracle: the unfolding process of inner city renewal and the production of citizens shaped by the collective rights defence actions in response to demolition and resettlement projects. Shi reveals a complex problematic tension between the state and the individual during China's social transition. This book is rigorously researched and draws on a rich body of materials. In this approach to State-Individual relationship, Shi Yunqing convincingly shows how citizens are produced in urban social movements against the backdrop of differences between Chinese and Western development histories. The production of citizens in "Chinese-style" produces insightful "local knowledge" and contributes to a new global sociology in general and the Post-Western sociology in particular. __________ , : , , " - " , , " " , ,

Global Trends of Smart Cities provides integrated analysis of 135 cities that participated in the IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge in 2010-2017. It establishes evidence-based benchmarking of city geographies, city sizes, governance structures, and local planning contexts in smart cities. This book uses a combination of descriptive statistical analysis and real-world case study narratives to evaluate the ways in which each individual urban variable or their combination matter in the diversity of smart city approaches around the globe. It is acknowledged that the Smarter Cities Challenge offers a particular set of smart initiatives and is not representative of all smart cities around the world. Nevertheless, the global presence of the Challenge across five continents and its involvement with 135 cities of all size and socioeconomic status provides a solid foundation to conduct comparative research on smart cities. Considering limited comparative research available in the smart city debate, this book makes significant contribution in understanding the state of smart city development in urban governments worldwide.

Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion.

This multi-disciplinary volume is the first collective effort to explore Istanbul, capital of the vast polyglot, multiethnic, and multireligious Ottoman empire and home to one of the world's largest and most diverse urban populations, as an early modern metropolis. It assembles topics seldom treated together and embraces novel subjects and fresh approaches to older debates. Contributors crisscross the socioeconomic, political, cultural, environmental, and spatial, to examine the myriad human and non-human actors, local and global, that shaped the city into one of the key sites of early modern urbanity. Contributors are: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano , Zeynep Altok, Walter G. Andrews, Betul Basaran, Cem Behar, Maurits H. van den Boogert, John J. Curry, Linda T. Darling, Suraiya Faroqhi, Emine Fetvaci, Shirine Hamadeh, Cemal Kafadar, Cigdem Kafescioglu, Deniz Karakas, Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik, B. Harun Kucuk, Selim S. Kuru, Karen A. Leal, Gulru Necipoglu, Christoph K. Neumann, Asli Niyazioglu, Amanda Phillips, Marinos Sariyannis, Aleksandar Shopov, Lucienne Thys-Senocak, Nukhet Varlik, N. Zeynep Yelce, Gulay Yilmaz, and Zeynep Yurekli.

Management of IoT Open Data Projects in Smart Cities demonstrates a key project management methodology for the implementation of Smart Cities projects: Principles and Regulations for Smart Cities (PaRSC). This methodology adopts a basis in classic Scrum soft management methods with carefully considered expansions. These include design principals for high-level architecture design and recommendations for design at the level of project teams. This approach enables the deployment of rule-based linguistic models for IoT project management, supporting the design of high-level architecture and providing rules for Scrum Smart Cities team. After reading this book, the reader will have a thorough grounding in IoT nodes and methods of their design, the acquisition and use of open data, and the use of project management methods to collect open data and build business models based on them.

Explores the unintended consequences of civic activism in a disaster-prone city After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people swiftly mobilized to rebuild their neighborhoods, often assisted by government organizations, nonprofits, and other major institutions. In Rethinking Community Resilience, Min Hee Go shows that these recovery efforts are not always the panacea they seem to be, and can actually escalate the city's susceptibility to future environmental hazards. Drawing upon interviews, public records, and more, Go explores the hidden costs of community resilience. She shows that-despite good intentions-recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina exacerbated existing race and class inequalities, putting disadvantaged communities at risk. Ultimately, Go shows that when governments, nonprofits, and communities invest in rebuilding rather than relocating, they inadvertently lay the groundwork for a cycle of vulnerabilities. As cities come to terms with climate change adaptation-rather than prevention-Rethinking Community Resilienceprovides insight into the challenges communities increasingly face in the twenty-first century.