What's the difference between a group of houses and a real community? Author Lola L. Lucas explores this question in "At Home in the Park: Loving a Neighborhood Back to Life."

Lucas chronicles the rebirth of Enos Park, a section of Springfield, Illinois, just north of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Like many cities, the area went through a period of urban decay before rebounding. The Enos Park Neighborhood Improvement Association (EPNIA) was largely responsible for this change.

Lucas's columns about Enos Park have appeared in the "EPNIA Banner" since 1992. With wisdom and wry humor, she shows why it's worth the effort to reweave a neighborhood's social fabric in order for residents to once again enjoy their homes. Lucas writes about community policing, ice cream socials, neighborhood patrols, and evening strolls on tree-lined sidewalks. Through the efforts of the EPNIA, the citizens of Enos Park reclaimed their streets and loved their neighborhood back to life.

This book focuses on the relationship between the state and economy in the development of cities. It reviews and reinterprets fundamental theoretical models that explain how the operation of markets in equilibrium shapes the scale and organization of the commercial city in a mixed market economy within a liberal state. These models link markets for the factors of production, markets for investment and fixed capital formation, markets for transportation, and markets for exports in equilibrium both within the urban economy and the rest of the world. In each case, the model explains the urban economy by revealing how assumptions about causes and structures lead to predictions about scale and organization outcomes. By simplifying and contrasting these models, this book proposes another interpretation: that governance and the urban economy are outcomes negotiated by political actors motivated by competing notions of commonwealth and the individual desire for wealth and power. The book grounds its analysis in economic history, explaining the rise of commercial cities and the emergence of the urban economy. It then turns to factors of production, export, and factor markets, introducing and parsing the Mills model, breaking it down into its component parts and creating a series of simpler models that can better explain the significance of each economic assumption. Simplified models are also presented for real estate and fixed capital investment markets, transportation, and land use planning. The book concludes with a discussion of linear programming and the Herbert- Stevens and the Ripper-Varaiya models. A fresh presentation of the theories behind urban economics, this book emphasizes the links between state and economy and challenges the reader to see its theories in a new light. As such, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of economics, public policy, public administration, urban policy, and city and urban planning. >

This book presents multi-sector practical cases based on the author's own research. It also includes the best practice, which could serve as a benchmark for the creation of smart cities. The global urbanisation index, i.e., the ratio of city dwellers to the total population, has been steadily increasing in recent years. It is highest in the Americas, followed by Europe, Asia and Africa. The city of the future will combine the intelligent use of IT systems with the potential of institutions, companies and committed, creative inhabitants. The administrative boundaries of today's cities put certain constraints on their further growth, but in the future these boundaries will no longer be as relevant. Cities in Europe face the challenge of reconciling sustainable urban development and competitiveness - a challenge that will likely influence issues of urban quality such as the economy, culture, social and environmental conditions, changing a given city's profile as well as urban quality in terms of its composition and characteristics.

This book focuses on territorial policies as instruments for local development in Europe's periphery. Using a multiple-case research design in three typical case studies in the context of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia (Italy), we empirically test the hypothesis that the institutionalisation of the governance system is an independent variable that is capable of influencing the quality of public policy, intended as a dependent variable. According to this hypothesis, the two above-mentioned variables tend to change according to a linear and direct correlation: upward variation of the degree of institutionalisation of the governance system tends to correspond to upward variation in the quality of the policy, and vice versa. In our conclusions, we discuss the descriptive and prescriptive implications of the empirical findings of the research for the local development of peripheral areas. Regarding the descriptive implications, we explain how territorial policy-making can be articulated, based on the degree of institutionalisation of the governance system and the quality of the territorial policies. Regarding the prescriptive implications, we identify the best practices for territorial governance in order to improve the chances of local development in Europe's periphery.

The book contains the proceedings of CAETS 2015 Convocation on 'Pathways to Sustainability: Energy, Mobility and Healthcare Engineering' that was held on October 13-14, 2015 in New Delhi. This 3 volume proceedings provide an international forum for discussion and communication of engineering and technological issues of common concern. This volume talks about 'Mobility' and includes 14 chapters on diverse topics like creating sustainable transportation systems, mobility of the future, unique engineering features like Delhi metro, digitally re-imagining mobility, trends and future strategies of transportation electrification, etc. The contents of this book will be useful to researchers, professionals, and policy makers alike.

This book examines urban development and its role in planning in China and other Asian cities. Starting with a substantial narrative on the history, development philosophy, and urban form of ancient Asian cities, it then identifies the characteristics of urban society and different phases of development history. It then discusses urbanization patterns in China with a focus on spatial layout of the city clusters in the Yangtze River Delta since the 20th Century. Lastly, it explores institutional design and the legal system of urban planning in China and other Asian cities. As a textbook for the "Model Course in English" for international students listed by the Ministry of Education in China, it helps international researchers and students to understand urban development and planning in Asian cities.

Cities are home to over fifty percent of the world's population, a figure which is expected to increase enormously by 2050. Despite the growing demand on urban resources and infrastructure, food is still often overlooked as a key factor in planning and designing cities. Without incorporating food into the design process - how it is grown, transported, and bought, cooked, eaten and disposed of - it is impossible to create truly resilient and convivial urbanism. Moving from the table and home garden to the town, city, and suburbs, Food and Urbanism explores the connections between food and place in past and present design practices. The book also looks to future methods for extending the 'gastronomic' possibilities of urban space. Supported by examples from places across the world, including the UK, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Australia and the USA, the book offers insights into how the interplay of physical design and socio-spatial practices centred around food can help to maintain socially rich, productive and sustainable urban space. Susan Parham brings together the latest research from a number of disciplines - urban planning, food studies, sociology, geography, and design - with her own fieldwork on a range of foodscapes to highlight the fundamental role food has to play in shaping the urban future.

This book explores contemporary challenges of housing movement organizations, looking specifically at the case of Rome, Italy. The work identifies conditions that allow the re-composition of a class of housing dispossessed and, consequently, the features of its action in urban spaces. The book offers fresh analytical perspectives to understanding contemporary urban transformation via new spatial and strategic approaches. In striking detail, Carlotta Caciagli shows how space is a crucial variable in shaping the strategies that allow for the politicisation of a movement's social base. She illustrates how new spatial configurations of urban space result from unique struggles of the recomposed collective subject. Most notably, three main conceptual tools are introduced to disentangle the relationship between the recomposed precarious class and space: "the spatial opportunity structure", "configurations of strategies" and "educational sites of resistance".

A new conventional wisdom, spanning academic and policy communities, sees a combination of economic competitiveness, social cohesion and responsive governance as essential for survival in the post-1980s world--and cities as crucial to achieving these goals. This interdisciplinary text provides the first critical examination of these ideas, drawing on the UK Cities research program and other recent research. It combines analysis of the competitiveness-cohesion-governance problematic with examination of the major processes underlying key sectors of the urban economy, physical development, social relations, neighborhoods and urban policy.

This book examines the nature and internal dynamics of China's urban construction land (UCL) development, drawing insights from the recently developed theory of regional political ecology. Based on the author's original research, it identifies two different types of UCL development in China, namely top-down, formal development in the legal and regulated domain, and spontaneous and informal, bottom-up development in the semi-legal, poorly regulated gray domain. Presenting a systematic analysis and comparison, it reveals a scale and speed of informal land development no less significant than that of formal land development, although informal land development tends to be scattered, pervasive, difficult to track, and largely overlooked in research and policy formation. Contrary to the popular perception of the peasantry as passive victims of land development, this book uncovers an intriguing dynamic in which the peasantry has played an increasingly (pro)active role in developing their rural land for urban uses in informal markets. Further, based on an investigation of UCL development in Beijing and Shenzhen, it shows an interesting trajectory in which the uneven growth and utilization of UCL are contingent upon the various developmental milieus in different places. China's land institutions, based on an urban-rural dual land system, are not conducive to the ultimate goal of saving and efficiently utilizing land. Accordingly, an urban-rural integrated land market and management system is highly advisable. The theoretical and empirical enquiry presented challenges the perceived notion of China's UCL development as the outcome of market demand and state supply. Further, it argues for an inclusive treatment of the informality that has characterized urbanization in many developing countries, and for a reassessment of the role played by the peasantry in land-based urbanization.

This monograph presents urban simulation methods that help in better understanding urban dynamics. Over historical times, cities have progressively absorbed a larger part of human population and will concentrate three quarters of humankind before the end of the century. This "urban transition" that has totally transformed the way we inhabit the planet is globally understood in its socio-economic rationales but is less frequently questioned as a spatio-temporal process. However, the cities, because they are intrinsically linked in a game of competition for resources and development, self organize in "systems of cities" where their future becomes more and more interdependent. The high frequency and intensity of interactions between cities explain that urban systems all over the world exhibit large similarities in their hierarchical and functional structure and rather regular dynamics. They are complex systems whose emergence, structure and further evolution are widely governed by the multiple kinds of interaction that link the various actors and institutions investing in cities their efforts, capital, knowledge and intelligence. Simulation models that reconstruct this dynamics may help in better understanding it and exploring future plausible evolutions of urban systems. This would provide better insight about how societies can manage the ecological transition at local, regional and global scales. The author has developed a series of instruments that greatly improve the techniques of validation for such models of social sciences that can be submitted to many applications in a variety of geographical situations. Examples are given for several BRICS countries, Europe and United States. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of urban dynamics, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

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 explores how to tackle the challenges of urbanization through international lessons in sustainable development and smart growth strategies. As readers will discover, smart growth offers an approach to urbanization with the aim to: improve the efficiency of land use, protect the natural and cultural environment, promote economic prosperity and improve the quality of life. Authors address various challenges experienced in China, including deepening regional imbalances, an aging population, wholesale environmental degradation and traffic congestion. China's official long-term urbanization plan sets many challenges for urban planners, these range from implementation of the plan and financing, to protection of vulnerable groups and social justice. This book brings readers up to date on the use of big data and modern technologies such as geographic information system technology (GIS). The work encompasses themes of environmental planning, community development, cultural heritage preservation, land use and transportation, urban studies, climate change, housing and community development, infrastructure planning, disaster planning and social equity. Authors present the very latest theories and practices of smart growth and offer many valuable insights to urban planners and scholars, as well as policy makers.

Improving the relationship between archaeology and local government represents one of the next great challenges facing archaeology -specifically archaeology done in urban settings. Not only does local government have access to powerful legal tools and policy mechanisms that can offer protection for privately owned archaeological sites, but because local government exists at the grassroots level, it is also often closer to people who have deep knowledge about the community itself, about its values, and about the local meaning of the sites most in need of protection. This partnership between archaeology and local government can also provide visibility and public programing for heritage sites. This book will explore the experiences, both positive and negative, of small and large cities globally. We have examined programs in the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly known as the British Commonwealth) and in the United States. These countries share similar perspectives on preservation and heritage, although the approaches these cities have taken to address municipal archaeology reveals considerable diversity. The case studies highlight how these innovative partnerships have developed, and explain how they function within local government. Engaging with the political sphere to advocate for and conduct archaeology requires creativity, flexibility, and the ability to develop collaborative partnerships. How these archaeological partnerships benefit the community is a vital part of the equation. Heritage and tourist benefits are discussed. Economic challenges during downturns in the economy are analyzed. The book also examines public outreach programs and the grassroots efforts to protect and preserve a community's archaeological heritage.

It is not possible to ignore the fact that cities are not only moving, vibrant and flourishing spaces, promising hope for better quality of life, but that they also accumulate and reflect significant problems. This book explores the relational and dynamic nature of urban inequalities, including their visible and invisible forms. By using the rather elusive term of 'uncertainty', the authors zoom in on specific aspects of urban inequalities that are difficult to measure, yet are acutely sensed and experienced by people and, more and more often, perceived as unfair. Here, in the recognition of inequalities as unjust and in the disagreement with the status quo, lies a positive aspect of uncertainty, which can lead to a social awakening and more active citizenship.

This forward-looking resource recasts the concept of healthy cities as not only a safe, pleasant, and green built environment, but also one that creates and sustains health by addressing social, economic, and political conditions. It describes collaborations between city planning and public health creating a contemporary concept of urban governance-a democratically-informed process that embraces values like equity. Models, critiques, and global examples illustrate institutional change, community input, targeted assessment, and other means of addressing longstanding sources of urban health challenges. In these ambitious pages, healthy cities are rooted firmly in the worldwide movement toward balanced and sustainable urbanization, developed not to disguise or displace entrenched health and social problems, but to encourage and foster solutions. Included in the coverage: Towards healthy urban governance in the century of the city< Healthy cities emerge: Toronto, Ottawa, Copenhagen The role of policy coalitions in understanding community participation in healthy cities projects Health impact assessment at the local level The logic of method for evaluating healthy cities Plus: extended reports on healthy cities and communities in North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East Healthy Cities will interest and inspire community leaders, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs working to improve health and well-being at the local level, as well as public health and urban development scholars and professionals.

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.

Urban Environments and Health in the Philippines offers a retrospective view of women street vendors and their urban environments in Baguio City, designed by American architect and planner Daniel Burnham in the early twentieth century, and established by the American imperial government as a place for healing and well-being. Based on a transdisciplinary multi-method study of street vendors, the author offers a unique perspective as a researcher of the place, to ultimately ask how marginalized women authenticate and democratize prime urban spaces for their livelihoods. This book provides a portal to another way of seeing and understanding streets and people, covering spatial units at multiple scales, design imperialism and its impact on health, and resilience strategies for challenging realities. Blending subjects of architecture, planning, and health, this book is an ideal read for those interested in fields of urban planning and design, public health, landscape architecture, geography, and social sciences.

This handbook provides a glimpse of the research that is underway in smart cities, with an examination of the relevant issues. It describes software infrastructures for smart cities, the role of 5G and Internet of things in future smart cities scenarios, the use of clouds and sensor-based devices for monitoring and managing smart city facilities, a variety of issues in the emerging field of urban informatics, and various smart city applications. Handbook of Smart Cities includes fifteen chapters from renowned worldwide researchers working on various aspects of smart city scale cyber-physical systems. It is intended for researchers, developers of smart city technologies and advanced-level students in the fields of communication systems, computer science, and data science. This handbook is also designed for anyone wishing to find out more about the on-going research thrusts and deployment experiences in smart cities. It is meant to provide a snapshot of the state-of-the-art at the time of its writing in several software services and cyber infrastructures as pertinent to smart cities. This handbook presents application case studies in video surveillance, smart parking, and smart building management in the smart city context. Unique experiences in designing and implementing the applications or the issues involved in developing smart city level applications are described in these chapters. Integration of machine learning into several smart city application scenarios is also examined in some chapters of this handbook.

This book provides an overview of the Horizontal Metropolis concept, and of the theoretical, methodological and political implications for the interdisciplinary field in which it operates. The book investigates the contemporary emergence of a new type of extended urbanity across regions, territories and continents, up to the global scale. Further, it explores the diffusion of contemporary urban conditions in an interdisciplinary and original manner by analyzing essential case studies. Offering extensive content on the Horizontal Metropolis concept, the book presents a range of approaches intended to transcend various inherited spatial ontologies: urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, and society/nature. The book is intended for all readers interested in the emergence and development of new approaches in cultural theory, urban and design education, landscape urbanism and geography.

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 volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities. It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:* Citizen participation and empowerment * Value creation mechanisms * Public administration* Quality of life and sustainability* Democracy* ICT* Private initiatives and entrepreneurship Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city's status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens' participation and the public administration's agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. Featuring contributions with models, tools and cases from around the world, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers, students, academics, professionals and policymakers interested in smart cities.

This book explores international practice in landscape architecture, focusing on the provision of services from Australia to China during China's contemporary urbanization and Australian landscape architects' approaches to place. Landscape architectural practice requires planners and designers to have a deep understanding of local culture, site characteristics, craftsmanship and even project procedures that are often intangible. How to acquire the above local knowledge has become a major challenge for international teams. Through the survey of the practice of Australian landscape practices in China and the case study of Li Lake planning and design project, this book reveals the process and difficulties of landscape planning and design as a transnational practice, as well as its special value as a way of cross-cultural fertilization. This book is intended for students, practitioners and researchers in the fields of landscape architecture, architecture and urban planning.

This book introduces the concept of the 'autonomous city'- a concept that has been developed from the 'smart cities' model that is based on a city's ability to gather data and taking it one step further. The digital revolution has brought about numerous changes in the urban realm, along with the understanding that technology can aid in increasing the performance and efficiency of urban areas. This technology has given rise to a wealth of data allowing urban leaders to respond better to crisis and craft policies that increase the liveability of urban areas. The 'autonomous city' explores the possibility of urban areas evolving from the dimension of data gathering to that of action response - so a city able to collect data and render real time decisions to self-manage a variety of functions based on its interpretation of that data. The book discusses how this could lead to the automation of select urban dimensions for increased efficiency and performance, but also details how such a process would require careful consideration when put into practice. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students across Urban Planning, Sustainability and STS, as well as practitioners and policy makers involved in the development of urban life.