This comprehensive volume examines contemporary life and history in Beijing, covering such topics as culture, politics, economics, crime, security, the environment, and more. While it is not China's most populated city, Beijing serves an important role as the political and cultural capital of the country. This volume examines Beijing's long history, contemporary society, and current challenges the city faces as we move further into the 21st century. Geared toward high school readers, undergraduates, and general readers interested in learning about Beijing, this volume consists of 12 narrative chapters focused on geography, history, and culture. Coverage includes location, people, history, politics, economy, environment and sustainability, local crime and violence, security issues, natural hazards and emergency management, culture and lifestyle, popular culture, and the future. "Life in the City" sidebars feature interviews and memories transcribed by people who are from, lived in, or traveled through Beijing, while other sidebars offer cultural fun facts and travel tips. This volume is the perfect read for anyone looking to get a better idea of what life is like in Beijing and how its culture has arrived at this point.

Understudied relative to other forms of intentional community, and under-recognized in policy-making circles, urban cohousing communities situate wellbeing as simultaneously social and subjective, while catering for groups of people so diverse in age. Collaborative Happiness looks at two such urban cohousing communities: Kankanmori, in Tokyo; and Quayside Village, in Vancouver. In expanding beyond mainstream approaches to happiness focused exclusively on the individual, Quayside Village and Kankanmori provide an alternative model for how to understand and practice the good life in an increasingly urbanized world marked by crisis of both social and environmental sustainability.

In the age of global climate change, society will require cities that are environmentally self-sufficient, able to withstand various environmental problems and recover quickly. It is interesting to note that many "smart" solutions for cities are leading to an unsustainable future, including further electrification, an increased dependence on the Internet, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence, and basically any technology that leads us to consume more electricity. This book examines critical topics in Smart Cities such as true sustainability and the resilience required for all cities. It explores sustainability issues in agriculture and the role of agri-technology for a sustainable future, including a city's ability to locally produce food for its residents. Features: Discusses safety, security, data management, and privacy issues in Smart Cities Examines the various emerging forms of transportation infrastructure and new vehicle technology Considers how energy efficiency can be achieved through behavioral change through specific building operations Smart Cities: Critical Debates on Big Data, Urban Development and Social Environmental Sustainability brings awareness to professionals working in the fields of environmental, civil, and transportation engineering, urban planners, and political leaders about different environmental aspects of Smart Cities and refocuses attention on critical urban infrastructure that will be necessary to respond to future challenges including climate change, food insecurity, natural hazards, energy production, and resilience.

This textbook provides an accessible and critical synthesis of urban regeneration in the UK, incorporating key policies, approaches, issues, debates and case studies. The central objective of the textbook is to place the historical and contemporary regeneration agenda in context. Section I sets up the conceptual and policy framework for urban regeneration in the UK. Section II traces policies that have been adopted by central government to influence the social, economic and physical development of cities, including early town and country and housing initiatives, community-focused urban policies of the late 1960s, entrepreneurial property-led regeneration of the 1980s, competition for urban funds in the 1990s, urban renaissance and neighbourhood renewal policies of the late 1990s and 2000s, and new approaches in the age of austerity during the 2010s. Section III illustrates the key thematic policies and strategies that have been pursued by cities themselves, focusing particularly on improving economic competitiveness and tackling social disadvantage. Section IV summarises key issues and debates facing urban regeneration upon entering the 2020s, and speculates over future directions in an era of continued economic uncertainty. The Third Edition of Urban Regeneration in the UK combines the approaches taken by central government and cities themselves to regenerate urban areas. The latest ideas and examples from across disciplines and across the UK's urban areas are illustrated. This textbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis that will be of interest to students, as well as a seminal read for practitioners and researchers.

This book introduces the fundamentals of research methods and how they apply to the discipline of urban and regional planning. Written at a level appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and beginning master's level students, the text fills a gap in the literature for textbooks on urban planning. Additionally, the book can be used as a reference for planning practitioners and researchers when analyzing quantitative and qualitative data in urban and regional planning and related fields. The volume does not assume advanced knowledge of mathematical formulas. Rather, it begins with the essentials of research methods, such as the identification of the research problems in planning, the literature review, data collection and presentation, descriptive data analysis, and report of findings. Its discipline-specific topics include field research methods, qualitative data analysis, economic and demographic analysis, evaluation research, and methods in sub-disciplines such as land use planning, transportation planning, environmental planning, and housing analysis. Designed with instruction in mind, this book features downloadable materials, including learning outcomes, chapter highlights, chapter review questions, datasets, and certain Excel models. Students will be able to download review questions to enhance the learning process and datasets to practice methods.

Biodesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Deep Green investigates the potential of nature based technology for shaping the evolution of contemporary architecture and design. It takes on the now pervasive topic of design intelligence, extending its definition to encompass both biological and digital realms. As in their first title, Systemic Architecture: Operating Manual for the Self Organizing City, the authors engage the topic through the specific lens of their innovative design practice, ecoLogicStudio and their research at the University of Innsbruck and at the Bartlett, UCL. Part One of the book, entitled PhotoSynthetica (TM), illustrates design solutions that engage the urban microbiome and seek to achieve an immediate impact, while Part Two, entitled Deep Green, includes synthetic landscapes and operates within a much larger spatio-temporal frame, going beyond human perception and life span to envision design as a geographical and geological force. In the age of catastrophic climate change, such perceptual expansion helps to clarify that change cannot simply be stopped or rolled back. We must instead establish more positive dynamics of change within the living world. To this end, this book proposes to engage with design and architecture as an extended cognitive interface, a sentient being that is co-evolutionary and symbiotic with the living planet, contributing to its beauty and to our continued enjoyment of it.

This book is a pioneering work to position the creative city concept within Malaysian urban development discourse. The chapters are written and systematically sequenced to be all-encompassing and comprehensible to audiences both from the academic and non-academic realms. The nascency of creative city development in Malaysia has motivated the timely exploration of the viability of this strategy for selected Malaysian cities (i.e. Kuala Lumpur, George Town, Ipoh, Johor Bahru). The book also discusses the global discourse on creative city and its critiques. This is followed by an overview of Malaysia's macrolevel socio-economic and political structures as well as national policies to frame the Malaysian creative city narrative. The case study chapters are novel, as each Malaysian city unravels its unique experiences and dissects the way the city responds to the creative city agenda amidst local nuances and idiosyncrasies.

'Cities have been studied and written on from a whole host of unique viewpoints. The contributors of this volume shed light on the city from several perspectives that together constitute the modern singularity of these spaces on Earth. Based on international and cutting-edge research, the content explores critical and sometimes contested issues such as innovation and entrepreneurship, technology, infrastructure, governance and the quality of life of urban inhabitants. The volume brings a clear and refreshing perspective on a fast changing reality.' - Jean-Claude Thill, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, US 'The Rise of the City is a must read for those who want to learn about achieving the promise of cities and urbanisation for society and the well-being of their people. The distinguished group of contributors provides a holistic roadmap about how cities can be economic engines of growth that promote innovation and creativity. This will not be easy as they also identify the challenges that must be overcome including better planning, inclusive governance, and sustainable development.' - Mark Partridge, Ohio State University, US Cities and city regions are growing throughout the world and this trend is forecast to continue well into the 21st century. The authors of The Rise of the City see the next 100 years as being the ''Urban Century''. In this book they examine urban growth and the dynamics that are transforming the city and city regions, focusing specifically on the spatial aspects of this process. Forces that are driving city growth include agglomeration spillovers, concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship, diversity of information and knowledge resources, better amenities and higher wages. These benefits produce a positive reinforcing system that attracts more people with new ideas and information, fuelling innovation, new products and services and more high-wage jobs, thereby attracting more people. Such growth also produces undesirable effects such as air and water pollution, poverty, congestion and crowding. These combined factors both impact and change the geography and spatial dynamics of the city. These transformations and the public policies that may be critical to the quality of life, both today and in the future, are the substance of this book. Providing a more informed synthesis of the city and its dynamics in the new century than any other volume, as well as a set of specific analyses and questions on the changing nature of the city, this book will be indispensible to scholars and students of regional science and urban studies. Contributors: A.E. Andersson, D.E. Andersson, M.G. Boarnet, A.M. Bonomi Barufi, S. Brunow, R. Camagni, R. Capello, A. Caragliu, Z. Chen, Z. Daghbashyan, C.F. Del Bo, R.K. Green, E.A. Haddad, B. Harsman, K.E. Haynes, N. Ishikawa, K. Kourtit, J.P. Larsson, M.M. Mazurencu, V. Miersch, P. Nijkamp, A.R. Olsson, R.R. Stough, M. van Geenhuizen, R.S. Vieira, Y. Wen, H. Westlund, Q. Ye

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.

This ground-breaking book is the first to bring an ecological focus to theatre and performance design, both in scholarship and in practice. Ecoscenography weaves environmental philosophies and practices across genres and fields to provide a captivating vision for the future of sustainable theatre production. The book forefronts leading designers that are driving this emerging field into the mainstream through their relational and reciprocal engagement with place, audiences, materials, and processes. Beyond its radical philosophy and framework, Ecoscenography makes a compelling case for pursuing an ecological ethic in theatre and performance design, not only as a moral imperative, but for the extraordinary possibilities that it offers for more-than-human engagement. Based on her personal insights as a leading ecological researcher and practitioner, Beer offers a rich resource for scholars, students and practitioners alike, opening up new processes and aesthetics of theatrical design that enhance the environmental and social advocacy of the field.

This book presents a multifaceted perspective on regional development and corresponding processes of adaptation and response, focusing on the concepts of polarization and peripheralization. It discusses theoretical and empirical foundations and presents several compelling case studies from Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.

This ground-breaking and compelling book takes us deep into the world of a public housing estate in Dublin, showing in fine detail the life struggles of those who live there. The book puts the emphasis on class and gender processes, revealing them to be the crucial dynamics in the lives of public housing residents. The hope is that this understanding can help change perspectives on public housing in a way that diminishes suffering and contributes to human flourishing and well-being. Combining long-term research into residents' lived experience with critical realist theory, it provides a completely fresh perspective on public housing in Ireland and arguably, beyond.

This book highlights recent advancements and innovations in trenchless technology via the adoption of combined micro-tunnelling and pipe-jacking techniques. This technique is more environmentally friendly, cost effective, less time-consuming and less disruptive compared to conventional open trench excavations for urban construction and urban infrastructure renewal projects. Pipe jacking is a non-destructive technique used in the installation of underground pipelines using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) and thrust forces derived from the hydraulic jack set-up in a deep jacking shaft. It is popular and commonly used worldwide for the installation of sewer and common services cable tunnels as well as for oil and gas pipelines.

The past decade has seen substantial progress towards the development of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Accompanying the technological developments, there has been much dialogue around the potential for CAVs to help solve a range of economic, social, and environmental issues. Some of CAVs purported benefits include, for example, greater efficiency in the use of existing transport infrastructure, improved safety through removing human error, and widening access to automobility. However, there are also many potential downsides, and whether and how CAVs will deliver on their promise remains shrouded in much uncertainty and not a small degree of scepticism. This book views developments around CAVs through the lens of local policymakers and the towns and cities they represent. We argue it is now time to expand the dialogue to include consideration for towns and cities beyond those early adopters to understand how they will fare, and how CAVs might interact with other important policy agendas facing them. We discuss the different challenges that CAVs will pose for the urban built environment and the required forms of preparedness for these. We also explore how CAVs will interact with other uses and users of cities, including potentially competing efforts to enhance urban wellbeing and liveability. Finally, we consider how responses to CAVs are being developed and what the implications of these are. This book will appeal to policymakers, practitioners, and academics interested in the potential impacts of CAVs and in understanding more about how they will shape and interact with cities and regions in the near future.

This book traces how naturalism-the idea of a common theory uniting natural social systems-has contributed to major shifts in urban planning. Beginning in the 17th century, when the human body began to emerge as an inspiration for urban planning, the book examines the work of medical analyses of city life. Responding to the 19th century industrial revolution and 20th century modernism, the Second World War and mass motorisation, Dr Marco Amati shows how vitalism, eugenics, evolutionary theories and medical treatments were applied to understand cities and propose new urban forms. While critically evaluating the uses of naturalism, Amati also observes a renewed interest in the application of sciences to analyse city life, arguing that this is essential to help resolve challenges of human-induced climate change.

This book, based on international collaborative research, presents a state-of-the-art design for "Smart Master Planning" for all metropolises, megacities and metacities as well as at subcity zonal and community and neighborhood level. Smart Master Planning accepts that all cities are a smart city in making in a limited way as far as the six components for smart cities, namely smart people, smart economy, smart environment, smart mobility and smart governance are concerned. Smart Master Planning in any city can only be designed and executed by active roles of smart people and smart city government and is a joint and synchronous effort of e-democracy, e-governance and ICT-IOT system in a 24 hour 7-day framework on all activities. In addition to use of information and communication technologies and remote sensing, the design of Smart Master Planning utilizes domain-specific tools of many aspects of a city to realize the coordinated, effective and efficient planning, management, development and conservation that improve ecological, social, biophysical, psychological and economic wellbeing in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of development ecosystems and stakeholders. This book will present 12 case studies covering more than 12 cities or more cities centered on domain-specific smart planning components. Case studies of digital innovations in the Smart Master Planning include Application of Artificial Neural Network in Master Planning for cities, Smart Master Plan and 3 D GIS Planning Support System and Digital Spatial Master Planning Incorporating Machine to Machine Automation for Smart Economic Community (IoT, ICT and M2M based Digital Integration).

Innovative study of state politics, identity and buildings that sheds new light on the links between the material and the ideational realms of contemporary life in Africa. Buildings shape politics in the ways they define communities, enable economic activity, reflect political ideas, and impact state-society relations. They are materially and symbolically interwoven with the everyday lives of elites and citizens, as well global flows of money, goods, and contracts. Yet, to date, there has been no research that explicitly connects debates about Africa's domestic and international politics with the study of architecture. This innovative book fills this gap, providing a new and compelling reading of the politics of identity in sub-Saharan Africa through an examination of some of its most significant buildings. Using case studies from nine countries across sub-Saharan Africa, this volume reveals how they are commissioned and built, how they enable elites to project power, and how they form a basis for popular conceptions of the state. Exploring a diverse range of buildings including parliaments, airports, prisons, ministries, regional institutions, libraries, universities, shopping malls, public housing, cathedrals and palaces, the contributors suggest a innovative perspective on African politics, identity and urban development. This book will be a compelling reference for scholars and students of African politics, development studies and city life in its elaboration of and challenges to established concepts and arguments about the relationship between material objects and political ideas. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.

Post-suburbia is a term that encapsulates a variety of contemporary urban forms, in particular the 'edge city' - a term used to describe the rapid growth of new urban centres at the edges of established major cities. Widely discussed in the US, very little has been written about European edge cities and this book provides a comparative analysis of examples in Greece, Spain, Paris, Finland and the UK, offering a theoretical analysis of the edge city and of post-suburban Europe.

This book showcases state-of-the-art advances in service science and related fields of research, education, and practice. It presents emerging technologies and applications in contexts ranging from healthcare, energy, finance, and information technology to transportation, sports, logistics, and public services. Regardless of its size and service, every service organization is a service system. Due to the socio-technical nature of service systems, a systems approach must be adopted in order to design, develop and deliver services aimed at meeting end users' utilitarian and socio-psychological needs alike. Understanding services and service systems often requires combining multiple methods to consider how interactions between people, technologies, organizations and information create value under various conditions. The papers in this volume highlight a host of ways to approach these challenges in service science and are based on submissions to the 2021 INFORMS Conference on Service Science.

Translocality in Contemporary City Novels responds to the fact that twenty-first-century Anglophone novels are increasingly characterised by translocality-the layering and blending of two or more distant settings. Considering translocal and transcultural writing as a global phenomenon, this book draws on multidisciplinary research, from globalisation theory to the study of narratives to urban studies, to explore a corpus of thirty-two novels-by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Kiran Desai, and Xiaolu Guo-set in a total of ninety-seven cities. Lena Mattheis examines six of the most common strategies used in contemporary urban fiction to make translocal experiences of the world narratable and turn them into relatable stories: simultaneity, palimpsests, mapping, scaling, non-places, and haunting. Combining and developing further theories, approaches, and techniques from a variety of research fields-including narratology, human geography, transculturality, diaspora spaces, and postcolonial perspectives-Mattheis develops a set of cross-disciplinary techniques in literary urban studies.

Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676). They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities.

In twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia's University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market. The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predominantly Black neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in the late 1960s to make way for the University City Science Center and University City High School. It also provides new insight into organizations whose members experimented during that same period with alternative conceptions of economic advancement. The book then shifts to the present, documenting contemporary efforts to position university-adjacent neighborhoods as locations for prosperity built on scientific knowledge. Wolf-Powers examines the work of mobilized civic groups to push cultural preservation concerns into the public arena and to win policies to help economically insecure families keep a foothold in changing neighborhoods. Placing Philadelphia's innovation districts in the context of similar development taking place around the United States, University City advocates a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments-and in one another-are precious urban resources.

Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city examines how urban health and wellbeing are shaped by migration, mobility, racism, sanitation and gender. Adopting a global focus that spans Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, the essays in this volume bring together a wide selection of voices that explore the interface between social, medical and natural sciences. Moving beyond traditional approaches to urban research, this interdisciplinary approach offers a unique perspective on today's cities and the challenges they face. Edited by Michael Keith and Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, this volume also features contributions from leading thinkers on cities in Brazil, China, South Africa and the United Kingdom. This geographic diversity is matched by the breadth of their different fields, from mental health and gendered violence to sanitation and food systems. Together, they present a complex yet connected vision of a 'new biopolitics' in today's metropolis, one that requires an innovative approach to urban scholarship regardless of geography or discipline. With chapters from a number of renowned authors including former Deputy Mayor of Rio de Janeiro Luiz Eduardo Soares, this volume is an important resource for anyone seeking to better understand the dynamics of urban change. Through a focus on the everyday realities of urban living, from health services to public transportation, the contributors offer valuable lessons for academics, policy makers and practitioners alike. -- .

Implementing Data-Driven Strategies in Smart Cities is a guidebook and roadmap for practitioners seeking to operationalize data-driven urban interventions. The book opens by exploring the revolution that big data, data science, and the Internet of Things are making feasible for the city. It explores alternate topologies, typologies, and approaches to operationalize data science in cities, drawn from global examples including top-down, bottom-up, greenfield, brownfield, issue-based, and data-driven. It channels and expands on the classic data science model for data-driven urban interventions - data capture, data quality, cleansing and curation, data analysis, visualization and modeling, and data governance, privacy, and confidentiality. Throughout, illustrative case studies demonstrate successes realized in such diverse cities as Barcelona, Cologne, Manila, Miami, New York, Nancy, Nice, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, Stockholm, and Zurich. Given the heavy emphasis on global case studies, this work is particularly suitable for any urban manager, policymaker, or practitioner responsible for delivering technological services for the public sector from sectors as diverse as energy, transportation, pollution, and waste management.

The urban attentions of Pritzker Laureate Sverre Fehn (1924-2009) are extensive, but as yet virtually unexplored. This book examines ten select projects to illuminate Fehn's approach to the city, the embodiment of that thinking in his designs, and the broader lessons those efforts offer for better understanding the relationship between architecture and urban life, with unignorable implications for emergent urban architecture and its address of sociological and ecological crises. Wary of large-scale planning proposals or the erasure of existing urban patterns, Fehn offered an uncommon and profoundly vibrant approach to urbanism at the scale of the single architectural project. His writings, constructed buildings, competition entries, and lectures suggest opportunities for reinvigorating architecture's engagement with the city, and provoke a rethinking of concepts foundational to its theorization. What is the nature of urbanity? What is the relationship of urbanity to the natural world? What is the role of architecture in the provision and sustenance of urban life? While exploring this territory will expand our knowledge of an architect central to key developments of late modernism, the range of the book and the arguments developed therein delineate far broader aims: a fuller understanding of architecture's urban promise.