Examines the making and remaking of Nairobi, one of Africa's most fragmented, vibrant cities, contributing to debates on urban anthropology, the politics of the past and postcolonial materialities. What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalised futures, try to ensure a place for themselves in the city's future? Exploring the relationship between the remains of empire and the global city, and themes of urban belonging and exclusion, housing and security, Constance Smith examines the making and remaking of one ofAfrica's most fragmented, vibrant cities. Nairobi is on the cusp of radical urban change. As in other capital cities across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched "Vision 2030", an urban megaproject that envisions the capital as a "world class metropolis", a spectacular new node in a network of global cities. Yet as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to regulate urban subjects. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a dilapidated, colonial-era public housing project built as a model urban neighbourhood but which is now slated for demolition, Smith explores how projects of self-making and city-making are entwined. She traces how it is through residents' everyday lives - in the mundane, incremental work of home maintenance, in the accumulation of stories about the past, in ordinary people's aspirations for the future - that urban landscapes are formed, imaginatively, materially and unpredictably, across time. Nairobi emerges as a place of pathways and plans, obstructions and aspirations, residues and endurances, thatinflect the way that ordinary people produce the city, generating practices of historymaking, ideas about urban belonging and attempts to refashion "Vision 2030" into a future more meaningful and inclusive to ordinary city dwellers. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,Rwanda: Twaweza Communications

This book critically examines the philosophy of the term 'transgression' and how it shapes the utopian vision of contemporary urban design scenarios. The aim of this book is to provide scholarly yet accessible graphic novel illustrations to inform narratives of urban manifestos. Through four select case studies from the UK, Cyprus and Germany, the book highlights the paradoxes and contradictions in architecture and provides detailed evaluation of the limits and contemporary forms of sustainable urban regeneration. The book proposes an 'utopian urban vision' approach to social, political and cultural relations, trends and tensions both locally and globally, and seeks to inspire an awakening in architectural discourse. The book argues that the philosophical undermining of transgression is the result of a phenomenon from a different perspective - its philosophical background, its social construction, its experimental research process and its design implications on the city. As such, the book provides a critical examination of how architectural design interventions contribute to sustainable urban regeneration, gentrification and can impact local communities. This book provides a significant contribution to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as early career researchers working in architecture, planning and sustainable urban design. It offers effective guidance on adopting the state-of-the-art graphical illustrations into their own design projects, while considering contradictions between architectural discourse and the philosophy of transgression.

As the world becomes more urbanised, solutions are required to solve current challenges for three arenas of sustainability: social sustainability, environmental sustainability and urban economic sustainability. This edited volume interrogates innovative solutions for sustainability in cities around the world. The book draws on a group of 12 international case studies, including Vancouver and Calgary in Canada, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US (North America), Yogyakarta in Indonesia, Seoul in Korea (South-East Asia), Medellin in Colombia (South America), Helsinki in Finland, Freiburg in Germany and Seville in Spain (Europe). Each case study provides key facts about the city, presents the particular urban sustainability challenge and the planning innovation process and examines what trade-offs were made between social, environmental and economic sustainability. Importantly, the book analyses to what extent these planning innovations can be translated from one context to another. This book will be essential reading to students, academics and practitioners of urban planning, urban sustainability, urban geography, architecture, urban design, environmental sciences, urban studies and politics.

With the global expansion of urbanization there is a need to ensure that cities develop in a way that allows all residents to benefit from urban life. This volume contains a collection of classic and more recent papers that provide insight into the problems encountered in urbanization and the ways in which planning has evolved to meet the resultant challenges. It is broad in its coverage, and its content includes both theoretical and applied contributions as well as looking at urban planning issues in the developing as well as the developed world.

Since the passing of the Housing, Town Planning, etc, Act, 1909, there have been published a considerable number of books and a vast number of pamphlets and magazine articles dealing with the subject of Town Planning. There has, however, been produced nothing that can be described as a text-book for the student." A detailed study, including the sociological basis of town planning, traffic requirments & roads, zoning, town planning, municipal planning, and early housing acts, later acts, and more."

The Global City & the Holy City explores the local embodied knowledge of women and men of different national, cultural and ethnic identities and age groups, living in London and Jerusalem. Their narratives focus on the three main concepts of Comfort, Belonging and Commitment to the various spaces in which they live. By deconstructing the meanings of these three notions and analyzing their expression in cognitive temporal maps, The Global City & The Holy City examines the practicalities of incorporating this kind of local embodied knowledge into the professional planning and management of cities in the age of globalization.

This book presents a systematic analysis of the differential implementation of the urban reforms in two Indian cities, Ahmedabad and Kanpur. It analyses the enactment of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in 2005 by the Indian government, which aimed to spatially reorient cities into market-friendly places across 65 cities but finished with only modest success. The volume discusses the specificities of urban governance systems, colonial municipal histories and nationalist struggle in relation to urban planning and policy reforms to showcase how policies insensitive to these are likely to fail. It identifies historically constituted municipal capacity - located in the municipal organisation at the city level - as the key determinant of divergent trajectories of the spatial changes. The analysis demonstrates that in Ahmedabad the politics of the city was historically oriented towards peoples' relationship with their spaces, enabling a coherent municipal organisation. In the case of Kanpur, however, the local politics evolved in a way that the urban question remained unresolved, which resulted in a fragmented municipal organisation. This variation in the architectures of municipal organisations in the two cities resulted in different levels of municipal capacities at the time of the inauguration of the JNNURM. A richly detailed case study on urban governance issues and development in Indian cities, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of urban studies, urban politics, development studies, social anthropology, social history, political science, development studies, public policy and governance, urban sociology and South Asian studies.

Explains smart city ecosystem and AI-centric solutions Presents the application of design principles and computer vision models for operating smart cities and security systems Discusses how to integrate the AI-based controls systems to make the IoT devices smarter Explains data engineering and visualization patterns for monitoring smart city systems Discusses self-driving car models and transportation infrastructures

This book offers a new perspective on French architecture, describing the impact of political history on the architectural development of Paris. Through various stages in history from the Roman to the Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern and Modern, Paris: The Shaping of the French Capital shows how the immense political power of monarchs, the aristocracy and church determined the pace and volume of building in Paris and the extent of town planning. Whereas many other great cities owe their historic importance to trade, and to local government (the City of London being a supreme example), these attributes were largely absent in Paris (throughout most of its history it didn't even have a mayor). Arguably, because of this, gradually over the centuries the French capital emerged as one of the world's most beautiful cities, and now is a metropolis with a population in excess of 2 million.

The 'smart city' is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. While commentators are increasingly critical of techno-optimistic narratives, the political imagination is dominated by claims that technical solutions can be uniformly applied to intractable problems. This book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how 'home-grown' digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upends the mainstream corporate narrative. Drawing on original research conducted in a range of urban African settings, Odendaal shows how these initiatives can lead to meaningful change. This is a valuable resource for scholars working in the intersection of science and technology studies, urban and economic geography and sociology.

Back to the Future explores new urbanism and urban revitalization within the context of public policy trends such as regional governance and the role of nonprofits. The purpose of this book is to provide students and professionals alike with a context for examining the beginnings of new urbanism, as well as to illustrate how this movement has become a nationwide trend in response to changing demographics and the real estate crisis. The book primarily utilizes comparative case studies within both inner city and suburban areas. While a growing number of articles have been written on both suburban and inner city new urbanist communities, few books have connected new urbanism to its roots in historical preservation communities. This book distinguishes itself from other works by assessing the commonalities between greenfield (suburban) new urbanist development and inner city (redevelopment) projects.

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders - mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists - are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a priority, and equipping workers with the skills they need. In The Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight success stories and the people behind them. * New York City: Efforts are under way to diversify the city's vast economy * Portland: Is selling the "sustainability" solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world * Northeast Ohio: Groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes * Houston: Modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder * Miami: Innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations * Denver and Los Angeles: Leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises * Boston and Detroit: Innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century The lessons in this book can help other cities meet their challenges. Change is happening, and every community in the country can benefit. Change happens where we live, and if leaders won't do it, citizens should demand it. The Metropolitan Revolution was the 2013 Foreword Reviews Bronze winner for Political Science.

In this book, the authors "revisit" two iconic Brooklyn neighborhoods, Crown Heights-Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and Greenpoint-Williamsburg, where they have been active scholars since the 1970s. Krase and DeSena's comprehensive view from the street describes and analyses the neighborhoods' decline and rise with a focus on race and social class. They look closely at the strategies used to resist and promote neighborhood change and conclude with an analysis of the ways in which these neighborhoods contribute to current images and trends in Brooklyn. This book contributes to a better understanding of the elevated status of Brooklyn as a global city and destination place.

Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.

This book breaks new ground in demystifying the relationship between architecture, nationhood, and other forms of collective identity. It attempts to extricate the oppressive ideology of national identity entrenched within the very idea of architecture. Authors investigate themes such as cosmopolitanism, diaspora, geopolitics, globalisation, hybridity, and race. Certain chapters expose highly regulated environments which support cultural hegemony, such as the context of a hostel for 'coloured colonial seamen' in London, the illusionary rhetoric of 'authenticity' used to legitimise architectural conservation, and the role of the mosque as mediator between a post-war, multi-racial Britain, and ideas of nationhood. Others engage subjects at the urban scale, including the phenomena of universities transcending their nation-building roots to become agents of cosmopolitan urbanism, and how the discursive context of a high-profile yet unrealised modernist office-block in the City of London sustained a culture of British faux-nationalism. Remaining chapters adopt a postcolonial lens, with one examining how particular works of literary fiction reimagine notions of 'place' within an emerging intercultural nation, and another exploring the tense relationship between identitarian form and affective atmospheres to suggest the possibility of anti-essentialist experiences of architecture. Together, these perspectives propose an alternative vision of the City, where neither state-sponsored identity politics nor right-wing populism determine the cultural context within which architects design for our collective urban experience. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Architecture, Anthropology, History, Human Geography, Politics, Sociology, and Urban Studies. The chapters in this book, except for chapter 1, were first published in the journal National Identities.

This book provides an overview of the large and interdisciplinary literature on the substance and process of urban climate change planning and design, using the most important articles from the last 15 years to engage readers in understanding problems and finding solutions to this increasingly critical issue. The Reader's particular focus is how the impacts of climate change can be addressed in urban and suburban environments-what actions can be taken, as well as the need for and the process of climate planning. Both reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as adapting to future climate are explored. Many of the emerging best practices in this field involve improving the green infrastructure of the city and region-providing better on-site stormwater management, more urban greening to address excess heat, zoning for regional patterns of open space and public transportation corridors, and similar actions. These actions may also improve current public health and livability in cities, bringing benefits now and into the future. This Reader is innovative in bringing climate adaptation and green infrastructure together, encouraging a more hopeful perspective on the great challenge of climate change by exploring both the problems of climate change and local solutions.

The past thirty years have seen a proliferation of new forms of territorial governance that have come to co-exist with, and complement, formal territorial spaces of government. These governance experiments have resulted in the creation of soft spaces, new geographies with blurred boundaries that eschew existing political-territorial boundaries of elected tiers of government. The emergence of new, non-statutory or informal spaces can be found at multiple levels across Europe, in a variety of circumstances, and with diverse aims and rationales. This book moves beyond theory to examine the practice of soft spaces. It employs an empirical approach to better understand the various practices and rationalities of soft spaces and how they manifest themselves in different planning contexts. By looking at the effects of new forms of spatial governance and the role of spatial planning in North-western Europe, this book analyses discursive changes in planning policies in selected metropolitan areas and cross-border regions. The result is an exploration of how these processes influence the emergence of soft spaces, governance arrangements and the role of statutory planning in different contexts. This book provides a deeper understanding of space and place, territorial governance and network governance.

Across the country, communities rely on their planning commissions for guidance. But who guides the planning commissioners? This step-by-step guidebook gets new commissioners off on the right foot and helps experienced commission members navigate their roles. The authors, all practicing planners, have worked extensively with planning commissions for decades. They have watched commissioners scramble up a steep learning curve, sit in the hot seat of controversy, and strive to make sound decisions for the places they call home. In this helpful handbook, the authors share ideas, insights, and information to help commissioners succeed. Eight detailed chapters cover everything from the nuts and bolts of development applications to the nuances of legal issues to the part commissioners play in long-range planning. Readers will learn how to prepare for their first commission meeting, review a development plan, invite productive public input, and steer clear of ethical dilemmas. Added resources include a glossary of planning terms, a list of training resources, and the American Planning Association's Statement of Ethical Principles in Planning. For anyone serving on a planning commission, The Planning Commissioners Guide is essential reading.

Urban Planning's Philosophical Entanglements explores the long-held idea that urban planning is the link in moving from knowledge to action. Observing that the knowledge domain of the planning profession is constantly expanding, the approach is a deep philosophical analysis of what is the quality and character of understanding that urban planners need for expert engagement in urban planning episodes. This book philosophically analyses the problems in understanding the nature of action - both individual and social action. Included in the analysis are the philosophical concerns regarding space/place and the institution of private property. The final chapter extensively explores the linkage between knowledge and action. This emerges as the process of design in seeking better urban communities - design processes that go beyond buildings, tools, or fashions but are focused on bettering human urban relationships. Urban Planning's Philosophical Entanglements provides rich analysis and understanding of the theory and history of planning and what it means for planning practitioners on the ground.

Today, urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations, technologies, and natural ecologies. This being the case, planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds as well as how they design and implement their plans. The contributors to this volume utilize a variety of examples - ecologically-sensitive, regional planning in Naples (Italy); congestion pricing in New York City; and public participation in Europe, among others - to explore how planners engage a heterogeneous and restless world. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor-network theory, each chapter draws on this "new materialism" to acknowledge, in quite pragmatic ways, that spatial politics is a process of becoming that is inseparable from the materiality of urban practices.

This book offers an overview and a theoretical conceptualization of the policies, practices and positioning strategies involved in branding Chinese mega-cities. This interdisciplinary book details the economic, cultural and social background of the development of Chinese mega-cities, as well as presenting the mechanisms of governance and urban growth strategies. Therein, the main discussion centres on the contemporary practice of city branding and development in China in relation to the rest of the world. This includes the way stakeholders and actors are engaged in city branding; the 'societal forces' that impact the city branding process; the way cities compete internationally; and how mega-cities build brands to strategically position themselves globally. Scholars and advanced students in areas of business, marketing, geography, political science and urban studies will find this book invaluable. The book will also be of interest to qualified practitioners with responsibilities in city branding and promotion, regional innovation and growth strategies, city planning and city architecture, and those involved in destination marketing and promotion activities. Contributors: P.O. Berg, E. Bjoerner, J. Delman, H. Fan, X. Fan, J. Jansson, M. Kornberger, P.T. Levin, B. Li, J. Li, M. Li, O. Loefgren, Q. Lu, C.-S. Ooi, S. Pandis Iveroth, C. Pasquinelli, D. Power, R. Qi, Y. Ren, X. Sui, Xin, M. Svensson, W.-S. Tang, Y. Wang-Vedrine, C. Wen, B. Wu, F. Xu, L. Ye, G. Zhang

Approximately 80 per cent of the population of Latin America is concentrated in urban centres. Pressure on water resources and water management in cities therefore provide major challenges. Despite the importance of the issues, there has been little systematic coverage of the topic in book form. This work fills a gap in the literature by providing both thematic overviews and case study chapters. It reviews key aspects of why water matters in cities and presents case studies on topics such as groundwater management, green growth and water services, inequalities in water supply, the financing of water services and flood management. Detailed examples are described from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, and there is also a chapter comparing lessons which might be learnt from US cities. Contributing authors are drawn from both within and outside the region, including from the Inter-American Development Bank, OECD and World Bank to set the issues in a global context.

Memories, both in individual and collective form, still have a significant impact on how people relate to political processes in Europe today. While much has been written about top-down attempts by states and political actors to mould people's memories of the past through public commemoration, textbooks or monuments, this volume takes a view from below by focusing on different types of societal actors and the ways in which they interact with the political world in order to influence collective memory. Presented within a comprehensive conceptual framework, the empirical cases focus on three countries of the former Soviet Union: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They show that different or even antagonistic perceptions of the recent past not only appear between different ethnic groups, but also between socio-economic groups, different age groups or generations as well as between women and men. Moreover, they give an impressive account on the multiple ways in which these perceptions empower individuals and groups to seek greater influence in the construction of collective memory. The volume, therefore, not only provides a valuable and fresh perspective on the relationship between social memory and democratic politics, but also contributes to post-Communist regional studies in the enlarged European Union. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.

With the increasing threat of depleted and contaminated water supplies around the world, this book provides a timely and much needed analysis of how cities should manage this precious resource. Integrating the environmental, economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions of water management, the authors outline how future mega-city systems can maintain a high quality of life for its residents. With the rapidly evolving and wealthy Shanghai as the key example, the paradox between the wealth of a city and the quality of its water is uncovered. With a multidisciplinary and multi-scale analysis, the supply of water to cities is discussed in the context of rivers, households, corporations, government and infrastructures. Chapters include the influence of household water use, the political economy of water management, the sources and management of pollution, catchment dynamics, and a Bayesian model for calculating future demand. This comprehensive study shows how essential water management will be to new, developing and expanding cities in the foreseeable future. Water Supply in a Mega-City will be of interest to researchers from across social, natural and engineering sciences interested in the theoretical and practical management of this essential resource in large cities, as well as those interested in the way cities respond to changing environmental conditions.

First published in 2005, this book examines the contribution of planning and integrated landscape management to the process of reversing the continuing deterioration of our natural environment. Planning for integrated buffer zones is important to conserve national parks, nature reserves, threatened habitats, other ecologically sensitive areas and heritage sites. This book begins with an examination of the role and nature of planning. It identifies the main types of planning problems and details a 'model' planning process that can be usefully applied to resolve them. Several theoretical and practical approaches to buffering environmentally sensitive areas are evaluated and a classification of existing approaches is detailed. Case studies are included to illustrate and test some of these approaches. The book concludes by recommending that integrated buffer zone planning should become a standard tool in real-life environmental planning and management. To facilitate this, an innovative approach to the design and implementation of integrated buffers is offered, including a step-by-step planning guide.