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 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.

This book aims to identify the challenges presented by current urban environmental governance practices in fast growing Indian cities, to propose changes to the current governance implementation strategies, and to explore the best practices to achieve sustainable urban models through Indian and global perspectives. With a focus on the city of Bengaluru, the book draws on extensive reviews of literature and data to present current trends and statuses of environmental resource use in growing urban centres of India.The book analyzes the situations that impact urban environmental governance decisions and outcomes and proposes solutions to address these issues for long-term sustainability. Policy makers, researchers, academics and development practitioners in environmental politics and urban governance will find this work of great interest. The book starts by examining different urban environmental threats on global and domestic levels, and provides evidence for the effectiveness of sustainable efforts to curb the impact of crisis-like scenarios. Then the book discusses the role of institutional regimes in influencing urban environmental outcomes through policies, and analyzes the role of various actors in the evolution of urban environmental governance from a legal perspective at global and local scales. In the final chapters, the book explores the trends and status of environmental resource management in Bangalore Metropolitan Area (BMA), and examines the dynamics of local institutions and governance structures for regulating environmental governance for promoting effective sustainable environmental governance in Bengaluru.

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.

This book qualitatively and quantitatively examines the relationships between the constructed environment, health and social vulnerability. It demonstrates that spatial disintegration is often intertwined with health and social inequalities, and therefore a multidisciplinary approach to urban health is essential in order to analyze the impact that psycho-social-environmental factors can have on objective, and perceived health and to investigate the inequalities in healthcare and medical assistance processes. Empirical relationships have been observed between urban environment, social vulnerability and health in different contexts, however there is still a lack of standardized tools that allow us to gain a clear understanding of how health inequalities and daily life are generated. In order to address this issue, a national network of active research groups has been created to draft and develop a prototypical analysis infrastructure to facilitate empirical studies aimed at shedding light on the complex relationships between health disparities, socio-environmental and economic distress, as well as personal and collective health. Given the interest in achieving meaningful, fair and lasting solutions to health inequalities, and the current lack of an analytical system, there is the need for new multidisciplinary approaches oriented toward the quality of life within a eco-social model of health. Providing an overview of the methodological approaches discussed, this book will appeal to researchers. At the same time it allows those working in local and government social care, healthcare and administrative institutions to gain insights into best practices in urban contexts.

investigates the relationship between mining, mine closure and housing policy in post-apartheid South Africa argues that the dependencies created by the mining industry and mine housing policies while a mine is operational causes serious societal problems when it closes applies the concepts of place attachment, asset-based development and social disruption will be of interest to students and scholars researching the social impacts of mining and the extractive industries, social geography and sustainable development, as well as policymakers and practitioners working with mine closure or social impact assessments.

This book is about changing the way we do public administration. It is about the wielding of administrative discretion in the implementation of a constitutional power: eminent domain, taking private property for public use. Administrative Discretion in Action: A Narrative of Eminent Domain, emphasizes the normative, constitutional perspective of public administration to study administrators' decision-making process that balances economic, political, and community interests-often in that order. It is about facilitating dialogue between public officials and the public. This book is a tool for interested scholars, practitioners, students, and community members about the dynamic of administration of public affairs in a political context. Grounded in public administration theory, this book utilizes an in-depth, comprehensive analysis of the US Supreme Court's landmark 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London-from the perspective of public officials and community members in the state of Connecticut (home of Kelo case)-to share a balanced narrative.

"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 examines the roles that public space plays in gentrification. Considering both cultural norms of public behavior and the municipal regulation of behavior in public, it shows how commonplace acts in everyday public spaces like sidewalks, streets, and parks work to establish neighborhood legitimacy for newcomers while delegitimizing once authentic public practices of long-timers. With evidence drawn from the formerly Latino neighborhood of Highland in Denver, Colorado, this ethnographic study demonstrates how the regulation of public space plays a pivotal role in neighborhood change. First, there is often a profound disharmony between how people from different cultural complexes interpret and sanction behavior in everyday public spaces. Second, because regulations, codes, urban design, and enforcement protocols are deliberately changed, commonplace activities longtime neighborhood residents feel they have a right to do along sidewalks and streets and within their neighborhood parks sometimes unexpectedly misalign with what is actually possible or legal to do in these publicly accessible spaces.

Capital cities today remain central to both nations and states. They host centres of political power, not only national, but in some cases regional and global as well, thus offering major avenues to success, wealth and privilege. For these reasons capitals simultaneously become centres of 'counter-power', locations of high-stakes struggles between the government and the opposition. This volume focuses on capital cities in nine sub-Saharan African countries, and traces how the power vested in them has evolved through different colonial backgrounds, radically different kinds of regimes after independence, waves of popular protest, explosive population growth and in most cases stunted economic development. Starting at the point of national political emancipation, each case study explores the complicated processes of nation-state building through its manifestation in the 'urban geology' of the city – its architecture, iconography, layout and political use of urban space. Although the evolution of each of these cities is different, they share a critical demographic feature: an extraordinarily rapid process of urbanisation that is more politically than economically driven. Overwhelmed by the inevitable challenges resulting from this urban sprawl, the governments seated in most of these capital cities are in effect both powerful – wielding power over their populace – and powerless, lacking power to implement their plans and to provide for their inhabitants. In its concentration on urban forms of multi-layered power, symbolic as well as material, Capital Cities in Africa cuts a new path in the rich field of studies related to African cities and politics. It will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, from political history, to sociology, to geography, architecture and urban planning.

The term "urban ecology" has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together "urban ecology" with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

This book offers new perspectives through which to observe and interpret mega-events. Using the specific case studies of World's Fairs, Di Vita and Morandi present a report of the Milan Expo 2015 and its trans-scalar legacies. While the event and post-event have been affected by the world crisis, the locations of exhibition areas have greatly expanded, encompassing regional as well as post-metropolitan spaces. The two main aims of comparing Milan to previous expos such as Lisbon 1998, Zaragoza 2008 and Shanghai 2010, were to demonstrate the contribution of the 2015 World's Fair to the urban innovation process and to the debate surrounding a new urban agenda; as well as to examine empirically and theoretically the international discussion regarding the growth of regional and macro-regional scales of contemporary cities in order to offer suggestions for future urban agendas through mega-events. This book will be of great value to students, researchers and policy makers in the area of urban planning and the urban studies more broadly, geography and spatial politics.

This book addresses the relevance of the case study research methodology for enhancing urban planning research and education in Africa and the global South. It provides an introduction to the case study methodology and features examples of its application to planning research and education on the continent.

This book provides holistic insights into management of protected areas across East Asia and identifies current trends in mountain tourism within the broader field of human geography and nature conservation. The book describes the diversification in visitors and expanding protected areas territories in different Asian countries during recent years. It also compares protected areas networks in the context of the changing demographic profiles of visitors and provides an interdisciplinary transnational appraisal of mountain-based tourism in Asia based on national and international statistics. The research combines specific case studies at the individual country and destination level with trans-regional trends, thereby offering analysis from both the perspective of supply (parks, protected areas, and stakeholders) and demand (mountain tourist market trends and segments). The book is a useful resource for students and academics in tourism and protected areas studies as well as social scientists and policy-makers interested in Asian countries.

This book conceptualizes community nutrition resilience as a critical area that is currently lacking the attention it requires from both the public and private sectors. The book spotlights Greater Miami's resilience efforts, both responding to slowly developing challenges such as immigration, environmental deterioration, and the wealth distribution gap, as well as sudden disasters such as hurricanes or flooding driven by climate change. Drawing on existing literature as well as interviews with professionals working in the field, the author makes recommendations on how to incorporate food systems into urban resilience planning, how to prioritize resilience on urban food agendas, and how to strengthen food system resilience through public, private, and third sector level engagement. She also highlights how the availability of and access to nutritious food impact the health, performance, and well-being of communities in the region, thus making a strong case for the prioritization of this growing issue.

From the cross-disciplinary perspective of urban management and planning, geography and architecture, this book explores the theory and methods of urban memory, selecting Beijing's historic buildings, historic areas, central areas and city walls as research cases. It is divided into three parts: factors analysis, modeling and practical application. It lays a scientific foundation and provides practical methods for the management of historical spaces, residents' and commercial activities, optimizing the layout and structure of the historic spaces, updating the protection of old buildings, promoting the organic growth of historic sites and the sustainable development of urbanization with new concepts.

Several Asian cities have already invested in initiatives to build and promote Green Cities. Owing to the limited capacity of local governments, the funding of urban infrastructure has become a critical issue. Against this background, this book explores a new funding mechanism which demands the engagement of many stakeholders, including public-private partnerships. This book offers guidance on how cities in selected countries can play a key role in the green growth agenda, by stimulating growth through smart investment in urban infrastructure such as through building a physical infrastructure, offering financial and tax incentives, and heightening society's awareness of a sustainable lifestyle.

Urbanisation and climate change are among the major challenges for sustainable development in Africa. The overall aim of this book is to present innovative approaches to vulnerability analysis and for enhancing the resilience of African cities against climate change-induced risks. Locally adapted IPCC climate change scenarios, which also consider possible changes in urban population, have been developed. Innovative strategies to land use and spatial planning are proposed that seek synergies between the adaptation to climate change and the need to solve social problems. Furthermore, the book explores the role of governance in successfully coping with climate-induced risks in urban areas. The book is unique in that it combines: a top-down perspective of climate change modeling with a bottom-up perspective of vulnerability assessment; quantitative approaches from engineering sciences and qualitative approaches of the social sciences; a novel multi-risk modeling methodology; and strategic approaches to urban and green infrastructure planning with neighborhood perspectives of adaptation.

The book reveals how green buildings are currently being adapted and applied in developing countries. It includes the major developing countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Cambodia, Ghana, Nigeria and countries from the Middle East and gathers the insights of respected green building researchers from these areas to map out the developing world's green building revolution. The book highlights these countries' contribution to tackling climate change, emphasising the green building benefits and the research behind them. The contributing authors explore how the green building revolution has spread to developing countries and how national governments have initiated their own green building policies and agendas. They also explore how the market has echoed the green building policy, and how a business case for green buildings has been established. In turn, they show how an international set of green building standards, in the form of various techniques and tools, has been incorporated into local building and construction practices. In closing, they demonstrate how the developing world is emerging as a key player for addressing the energy and environmental problems currently facing the world. The book helps developers, designers and policy-makers in governments and green building stakeholders to make better decisions on the basis of global and local conditions. It is also of interest to engineers, designers, facility managers and researchers, as it provides a holistic picture of how the industry is responding to the worldwide call for greener and more sustainable buildings.

This book highlights the electronic governance in a smart city through case studies of cities located in many countries. "E-Government" refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits are less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and/or cost reductions. The book is divided into three parts. * E-Governance State of the Art Studies of many cities * E-Governance Domains Studies * E-Governance Tools and Issues

This book presents a life-oriented approach, which is an interdisciplinary methodology proposed for cross-sectoral urban policy decisions such as transport, health, and energy policies. Improving people's quality of life (QOL) is one of the common goals of various urban policies on the one hand, while QOL is closely linked with a variety of life choices on the other. The life-oriented approach argues that life choices in different domains (e.g., residence, neighborhood, health, education, work, family life, leisure and recreation, finance, and travel behavior) are not independent of one another, and ignorance of and inability to understand interdependent life choices may result in a failure of consensus building for policy decisions. The book provides evidence about behavioral interdependencies among life domains based on both extensive literature reviews and case studies covering a broad set of life choices. This work further illustrates interbehavioral analysis frameworks with respect to various life domains, along with a rich set of future research directions. This book deals with life choices in a relatively general way. Thus, it can serve not only as a reference for research, but also as a textbook for teaching and learning in varied behavior-related disciplines.

Throughout history human beings have formed communities spontaneously with residences constructed haphazardly. Today a new type of community is emerging--one planned from the start regarding housing location, style, and governance. These Community Associations (CAs) have increased in number from 500 in 1960 to 205,000 in 1998. This book explores the issues surrounding this housing innovation and provides a history of community associations and their membership organization, the Community Associations Institute (CAI).

The book explores the process of trial and error in the design of CAs and how the CAI was set up to help them work. It opens with a consideration of the economics of land, housing, and community associations; explores the social, intellectual, legal background for CAs; and surveys their development in the United States. After considering the FHA's role, the book focuses on the development of the CAI .

This book seeks to contribute to prior research facing the discussion about public value creation in Smart Cities and the role of governments. In the early 21st century, the rapid transition to a highly urbanized population has made societies and their governments around the world to be meeting unprecedented challenges regarding key themes such as sustainability, new governance models and the creation of networks. Also, cities today face increasing challenges when it comes to providing advanced (digital) services to their constituency. The use of information and communication technologies (usually ICTs) and data is thought to rationalize and improve government and have the potential to transform governance and organizational issues. These questions link up to the ever-evolving concept of Smart Cities. In fact, the rise of the Smart City and Smart City thinking is a direct response to such challenges, as well as providing a means of integrating fast evolving technology into our living environment. This focus on the public value creation in Smart Cities could be of interest for academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts involved in and responsible for the governance, development and design of Smart Cities

This book examines electric car sharing in cities from a variety of perspectives, from service design to simulation, from mathematical modeling to technology deployment, and from energy use improvement to the integration of different kinds of vehicle. The contents reflect the outcomes of the Green Move project, undertaken by Politecnico di Milano with the aim of fostering an innovative and easily accessible electric vehicle sharing system. The first section of the book illustrates the car sharing service, covering service design, the configuration of the vehicle sharing model and the Milan mobility pattern, analysis of local demand and supply, testing of the condominium-based car sharing model, and communication design for social engagement. The second section then explains the technological choices, from the architecture of the system and dynamic applications to information management, the smartphone-based energy-oriented driving assistance system, automatic fleet balancing systems, and real-time monitoring of vehicle positions. In the final section, readers will find descriptions of the simulation model, a model to estimate potential users of the service, and a model for a full-scale electric car sharing service in Milan.

This book is devoted to the modeling and understanding of complex urban systems. This second volume of Understanding Complex Urban Systems focuses on the challenges of the modeling tools, concerning, e.g., the quality and quantity of data and the selection of an appropriate modeling approach. It is meant to support urban decision-makers-including municipal politicians, spatial planners, and citizen groups-in choosing an appropriate modeling approach for their particular modeling requirements. The contributors to this volume are from different disciplines, but all share the same goal: optimizing the representation of complex urban systems. They present and discuss a variety of approaches for dealing with data-availability problems and finding appropriate modeling approaches-and not only in terms of computer modeling. The selection of articles featured in this volume reflect a broad variety of new and established modeling approaches such as: - An argument for using Big Data methods in conjunction with Agent-based Modeling; - The introduction of a participatory approach involving citizens, in order to utilize an Agent-based Modeling approach to simulate urban-growth scenarios; - A presentation of semantic modeling to enable a flexible application of modeling methods and a flexible exchange of data; - An article about a nested-systems approach to analyzing a city's interdependent subsystems (according to these subsystems' different velocities of change); - An article about methods that use Luhmann's system theory to characterize cities as systems that are composed of flows; - An article that demonstrates how the Sen-Nussbaum Capabilities Approach can be used in urban systems to measure household well-being shifts that occur in response to the resettlement of urban households; - A final article that illustrates how Adaptive Cycles of Complex Adaptive Systems, as well as innovation, can be applied to gain a better understanding of cities and to promote more resilient and more sustainable urban futures.