What makes up a capital city? In this first comprehensive look at the architectural and urban visions for a European capital, Hein examines how these visions compare to the reality of the three headquarter cities for the European Union: Strasbourg, Luxembourg, and Brussels. Tracing the history of the EU and its creation of the new political entity of the polycentric capital, Hein explores the impact that European unification has on visionary projects and the transformation of EU member cities. Widely researched, the book also brings in architectural projects that have remained largely unknown until now. Using architectural and urban history as a lens, Hein examines the past five decades of European unification. Also analyzed for the first time are the debates, plans, projects, and constructions—both realized and failed—that accompanied this process. Looking to the future, Hein asserts that the task of these three capital cities is to balance the needs of a collective Europe with national, local, and—increasingly—regional demands.

Recent advances in information and communication technologies have enhanced the standards of metropolitan planning and development. These innovations have led to new opportunities in this evolving profession. Emerging Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities in Urban E-Planning brings together the efficiency of web-based tools and digital technologies with the practice of spatial planning. Focusing on the utilization of geographic information systems, computer-assisted design, visualization concepts, and database management systems, this book is a pivotal reference source for planners, policymakers, researchers, and graduate students interested in how recent technological advancements are enhancing the traditional practices in urban planning.

Civil Engineering and Urban Research collects papers resulting from the conference on Civil, Architecture and Urban Engineering (ICCAUE 2022), Xining, China, 24-26 June, 2022. The primary goal is to promote research and developmental activities in civil engineering, architecture and urban research. Moreover, it aims to promote scientific information interchange between scholars from the top universities, business associations, research centers and high-tech enterprises working all around the world. The conference conducts in-depth exchanges and discussions on relevant topics such as civil engineering and architecture, aiming to provide an academic and technical communication platform for scholars and engineers engaged in scientific research and engineering practice in the field of urban engineering, civil engineering and architecture design. By sharing the research status of scientific research achievements and cutting-edge technologies, it helps scholars and engineers all over the world comprehend the academic development trend and broaden research ideas. So as to strengthen international academic research, academic topics exchange and discussion, and promote the industrialization cooperation of academic achievements.

This volume explores the phenomenon and trend of cultural buildings by investigating 10 typical cities in China from the first, second, and third tiers, and from the Chinese diaspora. Each grand theater design was the result of a high-profile international competition and created by global architects in collaboration with Chinese design institutes. The national and international significance of these iconic projects lies in the fact that they not only reflect the dynamics of global design ideas, but also represent a particular historical moment in China's modernization process. The development, histories, and purposes of constructing cultural buildings are carefully outlined and colorfully presented. Given China's tremendous population, the development trajectory of its urban construction will provide insights for other regions that hope to embark on the high-speed track in the 21st century. "In 'Grand Theater Urbanism', Professor Charlie Xue and his team document China's current shift towards a culture of consumption and leisure, symbolized by the construction of multi-use Grand Theaters in major cities. 'Grand Theater Urbanism' reveals the unexpected variety and complexity of this contemporary cultural drive in a series of exemplary chapters with highly detailed, local, case studies." --Professor David Grahame Shane, Columbia University, New York "Jane Jacobs likened city life to a performance. This book goes a stage further and analyses the actual performance spaces within cities in China. In doing so it makes a valuable connection between urban design and the cultural life in cities. This is an important and often forgotten dimension of urbanism and I heartily commend this book to readers.'" --Professor Matthew Carmona, The Bartlett, University College London

This book examines the democratic acceptance of spatial planning measures, using Switzerland as a case study. The currently inefficient land use in industrialised countries calls for new spatial planning policies. Yet governments have largely failed to implement innovative policy measures, which may be due to a lack of democratic acceptance. To date, little is known about the democratic acceptance of spatial planning measures. Switzerland offers a promising candidate because of its direct-democratic system, which allows citizens' preferences for specific policy measures to be directly measured. In this work, the democratic acceptance of spatial planning instruments is investigated from various perspectives in the form of original empirical studies, which are embedded in an innovative conceptual framework. It demonstrates that not only spatial planning instruments in general, but also incentive-based instruments in particular, generally enjoy high acceptance. This finding is remarkable, considering the fact that efficient land use instruments have only been marginally implemented. Addressing the needs of both academics and land use practitioners in the private and public sector, the book shows that in order to improve the democratic acceptance of spatial planning measures, attention must be paid to their context, content and the means by which that content is provided.

Before the interstates, Main Street America was the small town's commercial spine and served as the linchpin for community social solidarity. Yet, during the past three decades, a series of economic downturns has left many of the great small cities barely viable. American Hometown Renewal is the first book to combine administrative, budgetary, and economic analysis to examine the economic and fiscal plight currently facing America's small towns. Featuring a blend of theory, applications, and case studies, it provides a comprehensive, single-source textbook covering the key issues facing small town officials in today's uncertain economy. Written by a former public manager, university professor, and consultant to numerous small towns in the Heartland, this book demonstrates the ways in which contemporary small towns throughout the nation are facing economic challenges brought about by the financial shocks that began in 2008. Each chapter explores a theme related to small town revival and provides a related tool or technique to enable small town officials to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Encouraging local small town officials to look at the economic orbit of communities in a similar manner as a town's budget or a family's personal wealth, examining its specific competitive advantages in terms of relative assets to those of competing communities, this book provides the reader with step-by-step instructions on how to conduct an asset inventory and apply key asset tools to devise a strategy for overcoming the challenges and constraints imposed upon spatially-fixed communities. American Hometown Renewal is an essential primer for students studying city management, economic community development, and city planning, and will be a trusted handbook for city managers, geographers, city planners, urban or rural sociologists, political scientists, and regional microeconomists.

In today's changing and transforming socio-economic, political, cultural, and technological paradigms, we encounter many methodologies, approaches, proposals, and practices in reconsidering the disappearing or emerging relations in the human/nonhuman-environment-nature interaction. These approaches, proposals, and practices range from new methods of urban gardening to biophilic design and augmented/immersive environments. However, these human-centric approaches, which only aim to meet their needs or emerge as technology-oriented replicas and representations of nature, lead to a departure from a holistic approach to the natural and artificial environment. Therefore, how can new and emerging approaches or methodologies draw a holistic framework for environmental health, sustainability, wellness, and co-existence between environments for all living beings? Emerging Approaches in Design and New Connections With Nature covers a variety of topics related to the intersection between nature, environment, and ways of living and provides a comprehensive guide to biophilic design and the idea of design and nature, including benefits, theories, and effects. Covering topics such as biophilic design and sustainability, soundscapes and landscapes, and urban environments and design, it is ideal for architects, designers, urban planners, landscape designers, policymakers, engineers, interior designers, practitioners, students, academicians, and researchers.

Explores popular economic development strategies in midsize Canadian urban areas. Roads to Prosperity: Economic Development Lessons from Midsize Canadian Cities explores the relative prosperity of midsize Canadian urban areas (population 50,000 to 400,000) over the past two decades. Communities throughout North America have strived for decades to maintain and enhance the prosperity of their residents. In the areas that are the focus of this research, the results of these efforts have been mixed-some communities have been relatively successful while others have fallen further behind the national averages. Midsize cities often lack the resources, both internal and external, to sustain and enhance their prosperity. Policies and strategies that have been successful in larger urban areas may be less effective (or unaffordable) in smaller ones. Roads to Prosperity first examines the economic structure of forty-two Canadian urban regions that fall within the midsize range to determine the economic specializations that characterize these communities and to trace how these specializations have evolved over the time period between 1991 and 2011. While urban areas with an economic base of natural resource or manufacturing industries tend to retain this economic function over the years, communities that rely on the service industries have been much more likely to experience some degree of restructuring in their economies over the past twenty years. The second part of the book looks at a number of currently popular economic development strategies as they have been applied to midsize urban areas and their success and failures. While there appears to be no single economic development strategy that will lead to greater prosperity for every community, Sands and Reese explore the various factors that help explain why some work and others don't.

This book comprises a selection of the top contributions presented at the second international conference "Smart and Sustainable Planning for Cities and Regions 2017", held in March 2017 in Bolzano, Italy. Featuring forty-six papers by policy-makers, academics and consultants, it discusses current groundbreaking research in smart and sustainable planning, including the progress made in overcoming cities' challenges towards improving the quality of life. Climate change adaptation and mitigation of global warming, generally identified as drivers of global policies, are just the "tip of the iceberg" when it comes to smart energy transition. Indeed, equally relevant towards this current transformation - and key topics in this volume - are ICTs, public spaces and society; next economy for the city; strategies and actions for good governance; urban-rural innovation; rethinking mobility. The book's depth in understanding and insightfulness in re-thinking demonstrate the breaking of new ground in smart and sustainable planning. A new ground that policy-makers, academics and consultants may build upon as a bedrock for smart and sustainable planning.

East Naples' contemporary history is not special, or unique: its processes shaped a mostly grey suburb nestled in the immediate vicinity of the great southern city, sharing its limits and feeding its needs. An imaginary tourist would search in vain for the ancient natural landscape, formerly a splendid threshold between coastal and marshy ecosystems, now humiliated by the sedimentary accumulation of bricks, fumes, oil and poisons generated by the main actors of the area's contemporary history - manufacturing and housing. Across the globe, peripheral areas have experienced the same deep environmental changes under the processes of energy transitions, economic development and urbanisation. The historian must interrogate the human choices, the material context and the different perceptions of nature, health or production that led to these changes as part of an environmentally-focused perspective on two of modernity's distinctive global processes: industrialisation and deindustrialisation. The resultant narrative of relations between human choices and East Naples' environmental limits is marked by the transition from an actual swamp to a metaphorical one, an ambiguous space characterised by chaos and disorder, hostility and risks, but also resistance, dignity and hope. This book reconstructs the discursive and physical factors that created the East Naples 'swamp', from the late eighteenth century to the present, analysing hygienist thought and urbanisation, industrialisation and deindustrialisation, ecological risks and urban requalification attempts.

This book includes papers presented at the 6th Arte-Polis International Conference. The theme of the conference was "Imagining Experiences: Creative Tourism and the Making of Place", and the book brings together studies based on lessons-learned, research and critical reviews related to creative tourism and reflections on placemaking. Covering a broad range of topics, including cultural and experiential perceptions of landscape, sustainable design, urban and rural planning, traditional and vernacular environment, public realm, thematic tourism, as well as heritage preservation and management, it discusses how issues of tourism shape our understanding of and discourse on architecture and landscapes. The book serves as an invitation to more participatory and polyphonic dialogues in the field of architecture, art and planning.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This prescient book presents the intellectual terrain of shrinking cities while exploring the key research questions in each of the field?s sub-domains and reviewing the range of methodologies within these topics. The book begins with an introduction outlining what shrinking cities are and how they are researched, highlighting both the opportunities and challenges that arise in this field, including the big ideas any researcher must grapple with. The next six chapters are each devoted to a different sub-domain within shrinking cities, offering a quick overview of the topics, relevant problems, paradoxes and key research questions. The book concludes with a review of the major themes and, most importantly, looks toward the future, predicting and anticipating the most significant future research trends related to shrinking cities. This accessible and compelling Research Agenda will be of interest to researchers looking to move into this area, urban studies and planning instructors who are teaching research methods courses, and students studying or independently researching shrinking cities.

Mounting scientific evidence generated over the past decade highlights the significant role of our cities' built environments in shaping our health and well-being. In this book, the authors conceptualize the 'urban health niche' as a novel approach to public health and healthy-city planning that integrates the diverse and multi-level health determinants present in a city system.The authors trace the origins of public health and city planning, drawing upon the shifting paradigms of epidemiology. Advanced network analysis techniques are employed to examine multi-scale associations between individual-level health outcomes and built environment features such as density, land-use mix and road network configuration. Healthy Cities will prove a fascinating read for an interdisciplinary body of scholars, practitioners and policy makers within the domains of public policy, regional and urban studies, urban planning, spatial epidemiology, health geography, sociology, public health and psychology.

Technological advancements have changed that way we think of traditional urban and spatial planning. The inclusion of conventional elements with modern technologies is allowing this field to advance at a rapid pace. Technologies in Urban and Spatial Planning: Virtual Cities and Territories covers a multitude of newly developed hardware and software technology advancements in urban and spatial planning and architecture. This publication draws on the most current research and studies of field practitioners who offer solutions and recommendations for further growth, specifically in urban and spatial developments. Researchers, practitioners, and graduate students seeking to enhance their understanding of the latest advancements and theories will benefit greatly from this publication.

As both a physical living space and emotional environment, cities impact human beings in a number of ways. These ways include but are not limited to the kinds of relationship that may exist among the varying categories of inhabitants of the city, the organization of and accessibility to leaning resources and facilities, the types and rates of migration impacting the city, the security level of the city, and the livelihood networks existing within the city. Learning Cities, Town Planning, and the Creation of Livelihoods is an essential research publication that explores livelihood types and lifelong learning typologies required by cities as well as the relationship between higher education and improved livelihood outcomes. Featuring a broad range of topics such as learning needs, economy, and technologically advanced societies, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, academicians, researchers, students, social workers, educators, politicians, and environmentalists.

This book examines the neighborhoods of New York City to determine to what extent planning in New York addresses Sustainable City Principles (SCPs). Part I looks at the background to planning urban areas in the face of global urban changes. These changes (i.e. population movements and densification of cities) are placing pressures on cities worldwide. Chapter 1 provides a background to these global pressures (i.e. population growth) and their implications. Chapter 2 looks closer at New York planning and introduces Sustainable City Principles (SCPs). Part II introduces nine selected neighborhoods within Manhattan and examines to what extent planning of these neighborhoods addresses the SCPs. For each chapter a neighborhood background is provided and results of the author's field survey are reviewed. Part III examines the selected neighborhoods within Brooklyn to determine to what extent planning of those neighborhoods addresses the SCPs. Part IV examines the last three neighborhoods (in Queens) and addresses the SCPs. Part V examines conclusions reached from examining the nine neighborhoods. These conclusions are used to determine the extent that the City Council (and the community) are addressing SCPs in planning neighborhoods. Finally, lessons learned from these conclusions are assessed for their relevance to planning neighborhoods anywhere in the world.

Coming Home to New Orleans documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after hurricane Katrina, and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. The book begins with two chapters that address Katrina's impact and the planning and public sector recovery policies that set the context for neighborhood recovery. Rebuilding narratives for six New Orleans neighborhoods are then presented and analyzed. In the heavily flooded Broadmoor and Village de L'Est neighborhoods, residents coalesced around communitywide initiatives, one through a neighborhood association and the second under church leadership, to help homeowners return and restore housing, get key public facilities and businesses rebuilt and create new community-based organizations and civic capacity. A comparison of four adjacent neighborhoods in the center of the city show how differing socioeconomic conditions, geography, government policies and neighborhood capacity created varied recovery trajectories. The concluding chapter argues that grassroots and neighborhood scale initiatives can make important contributions to city recovery in four areas: repopulation, restoring "complete neighborhoods " with key services and amenities, rebuilding parts of the small business economy and enhancing recovery capacity. It also calls for more balanced investments and policies to rebuild rental and owner-occupied housing and more deliberate collaboration with community-based organizations to undertake and implement recovery plans, and proposes changes to federal disaster recovery policies and programs to leverage the contribution of grassroots rebuilding and more support for city recovery.

The book compares different approaches to urban development in Singapore and Seoul over the past decades, by focusing on community participation in the transformation of neighbourhoods and its impact on the built environment and communal life. Singapore and Seoul are known for their rapid economic growth and urbanisation under a strong control of developmental state in the past. However, these cities are at a critical crossroads of societal transformation, where participatory and community-based urban development is gaining importance. This new approach can be seen as a result of a changing relationship between the state and civil society, where an emerging partnership between both aims to overcome the limitations of earlier urban development. The book draws attention to the possibilities and challenges that these cities face while moving towards a more inclusive and socially sustainable post-developmental urbanisation. By applying a comparative perspective to understand the evolving urban paradigms in Singapore and Seoul, this unique and timely book offers insights for scholars, professionals and students interested in contemporary Asian urbanisation and its future trajectories.

This book presents possible alternatives and interpretations to the well established notion in the mostly western discourse on public space. The discourse on public space as understood in the democratic-rationalist tradition, when applied to the Singaporean public space, would offer much criticism but would not be adequate in identifying alternative processes that allow for transformative potentials in public space. Thus said, the objectives of this book are: 1. To develop a conceptual frame of reference to construct the discourse on Singapore public space 2. To form a preliminary model of Singapore public space through analyzing case studies 3. To understand the modes, methods of production and representation of these public spaces within the rapidly changing urban context 4. To situate these constructions of public space and its possible trajectories within the larger discourse on public space, and to examine the viability of such a construction and interpretive model of public space

"There are many good books focused on the theme of sustainability and cities. However, very few books examine how the three sectors of organizational life in a city -- the private, government, and non-profit -- work toward sustainability in one particular city. Oakland, California: Toward a Sustainable City identifies some of the best projects, practices, and people who are contributing to the present and future sustainability of Oakland. Although the focus of the book might seem local -- Oakland, California -- the projects and practices are ones that can be replicable in any city. The book is unique also in identifying how religious organizations, that responded slowly to environmental issues, are very much involved in the sustainability of a city. Finally, the book identifies practices in schools that can help young people develop the good character to improve the quality of life in a city." Some of the chapters in the book discuss green design, green business, and green building; sprawl versus the compact city; the automobile-dependent versus the pedestrian-centered city; affordable housing and homelessness; rebuilding community; and utility bicycling.

This book discusses Asia's rapid pace of urbanization, with a particular focus on new spaces created by and for everyday religiosity. The essays in this volume - covering topics from the global metropolises of Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong to the regional centers of Gwalior, Pune, Jahazpur, and sites like Wudang Mountain - examine in detail the spaces created by new or changing religious organizations that range in scope from neighborhood-based to consciously global. The definition of "spatial aspects" includes direct place-making projects such as the construction of new religious buildings - temples, halls and other meeting sites, as well as less tangible religious endeavors such as the production of new "mental spaces" urged by spiritual leaders, or the shift from terra firma to the strangely concrete effervesce of cyberspace. With this in mind, it explores how distinct and blurred, and open and bounded communities generate and participate in diverse practices as they deliberately engage or disengage with physical landscapes/cityscapes. It highlights how through these religious organizations, changing class and gender configurations, ongoing political and economic transformations, continue as significant factors shaping and affecting Asian urban lives. In addition, the books goes further by exploring new and often bittersweet "improvements" like metro rail lines, new national highways, widespread internet access, that bulldoze - both literally and figuratively - religious places and force relocations and adjustments that are often innovative and unexpected. Furthermore, this volume explores personal experiences within the particularities of selected religious organizations and the ways that subjects interpret or actively construct urban spaces. The essays show, through ethnographically and historically grounded case studies, the variety of ways newly emerging religious communities or religious institutions understand, value, interact with, or strive to ignore extreme urbanization and rapidly changing built environments.

The creation of metropolitan areas is influenced by a wide array of factors, both practical and ecological. They can also be influenced by immaterial characteristics of a given area. The Handbook of Research on Perception-Driven Approaches to Urban Assessment and Design is a scholarly resource that assesses metropolitan development and its relation to the ecological and sustainability issues these areas face. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as user-centered urban planning, perception of urban landscapes, and thermal comfort in urban contexts, this publication is geared toward professionals, practitioners, researchers, and students seeking relevant research on the effective planning of metropolitan areas and their relation to the ecological and sustainability issues that face such areas.