This book offers a transdisciplinary perspective on the concept of "smart villages" Written by an authoritative group of scholars, it discusses various aspects that are essential to fostering the development of successful smart villages. Presenting cutting-edge technologies, such as big data and the Internet-of-Things, and showing how they have been successfully applied to promote rural development, it also addresses important policy and sustainability issues. As such, this book offers a timely snapshot of the state-of-the-art in smart village research and practice.

This book addresses the topic of urban models with reference to large western cities and particularly to global cities. In the current transitional phase, the use of language and the systematization of phenomena has become important. The book 's matrix examines two important and strongly connected themes: urban models and public-private partnerships (PPP) determined by urban functions which are transformed in an increasingly rapid and complex manner as a result of globalization. PPPs represent the new border of the modern global state. The book focuses on two principal urban models (renewal and restructuring) through PPPs and subsequently the relationship between state and market in fourteen Italian cities (renewal) and two central European cities, Leipzig and Budapest (restructuring). CoUrbIT (Complex Urban Investment Tools) and the book 'Globalization and Urban Implosion: Creating New Competitive Advantage' by the same author serve as points of reference.

This book fills a major gap in academic research, by exploring 'urban resilience measures' and 'city management issues' during disruptive disease outbreak events. Based on the overarching concept of 'resilience thinking', it addresses critical issues of preparedness, responsiveness and reflectiveness in the event of outbreak, focusing on cities and how they should prepare to combat a variety of adversities and uncertainties caused by outbreaks. This comprehensive book is an essential guide for decision-makers, city authorities, planners, healthcare and public health authorities, and those communities and businesses that face disease outbreak events. It also offers a set of practical measures to support the development of tailor-made strategies in the form of an action plan. These strategies should address outbreak control and containment measures, institutional rearrangements, management of urban systems, and healthiness of the society. Divided into six chapters, this book explores important topics of 'urban resilience' and 'city management' for preparedness action plans and responsiveness planning. Further, it presents a comprehensive urban resilience approach used to support city management in the recent outbreaks in Chinese cities, which can be applied in cities around the globe to strengthen their resilience and maximise the practicality of urban resilience and minimise urban vulnerabilities during disease outbreaks. Highlighting topics such as maintaining societal well-being, community engagement, and multi-sectoral city management enhancement, this book offers a unique combination of research, practices and lessons learned to aid cities in need.

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.

Now that the Earth has reached the limits of its biophysical carrying capacity, we have to change technologies, social practices and social norms relating to material production and consumption to ensure that we do not further jeopardize the functioning of our planet's life support systems. Through research, education and civic engagement, universities have a pivotal role to play in this transition. This timely book explores how universities are establishing living laboratories for sustainable development, and examines the communication networks and knowledge infrastructures that underpin impact both on and beyond the campus. The expert contributors present case studies of living laboratories being built in leading universities across four continents. Their aim is to cultivate the transition to sustainable development by actively fostering social and technological change to improve use of natural resources and reduce pollution. They are designed to link research, education and practice and to integrate knowledge across disciplines to develop more socially robust approaches to improving sustainability. Directing attention to what enables and constrains learning in communities of multiple and very diverse stakeholders in such laboratories can contribute to a better general understanding of factors influencing the chance of success (or failure), and the institutional arrangements, norms and values that accompany it. Focussing on social learning processes to drive societal change for sustainable development, this fascinating book will prove an invaluable read for academics, researchers, students and policy makers in the fields of higher education, regional and urban studies, public policy and the environment, and development studies. Contributors: B. Baleti , T. Becker, T. Berkhout, A. Campbell, A. Cayuela, S. Chen, M. Dalbro, J. Evans, M. Hesse, J. Holmberg, M. Holme Samsoe, Y. Hua, J.-H. Kain, A. Kildahl, H. Komatsu, A. Koenig, N. Kurata, S. Liao, U. Lundgren, B. Meehan, E. Omrcen, T. Ozasa, M. Polk, C. Powell, J. Robinson, H. Tan, T. Ueno

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.

This book explores how environmental urban design can benefit from established and emerging representation and simulation techniques that meet the need for a multisensory approach. Bringing together contributions by researchers and practicing professionals that approach the topics discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives and draw on case-study applications, it addresses important themes including digital modeling, physical modeling, mapping, and simulation. The chapters are linked by their relevance to simple but crucial questions: How can representational solutions enhance an urban design approach in which people's well-being is considered the primary goal? How can one best represent and design the ambiance of places? What kinds of technologies and tools are available to support multisensory urban design? How can current and future environments be optimally represented and simulated, taking into account the way in which we experience places? Shedding new light on these key questions, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.

This book strategically focuses upon the feasibility of positioning Indigenous Knowledge Systems into tertiary built environment education and research in Australia. Australian tertiary education has little engaged with Indigenous peoples and their Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and the respectful translation of their Indigenous Knowledge Systems into tertiary education learning. In contrast, while there has been a dearth of discussion and research on this topic pertaining to the tertiary sector, the secondary school sector has passionately pursued this topic. There is an uneasiness by the tertiary sector to engage in this realm, overwhelmed already by the imperatives of the Commonwealth's 'Closing the Gap' initiative to advance Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary education successes and appointments of Indigenous academics. As a consequence, the teaching of Indigenous Knowledge Systems relevant to professional disciplines, particularly landscape architecture where it is most apt, is overlooked and similarly little addressed in the relevant professional institute education accreditation standards.

Energy Storage in Energy Markets reviews the modeling, design, analysis, optimization and impact of energy storage systems in energy markets in a way that is ideal for an audience of researchers and practitioners. The book provides deep insights on potential benefits and revenues, economic evaluation, investment challenges, risk analysis, technical requirements, and the impacts of energy storage integration. Heavily referenced and easily accessible to policymakers, developers, engineer, researchers and students alike, this comprehensive resource aims to fill the gap in the role of energy storage in pool/local energy/ancillary service markets and other multi-market commerce. Chapters elaborate on energy market fundamentals, operations, energy storage fundamentals, components, and the role and impact of storage systems on energy systems from different aspects, such as environmental, technical and economics, the role of storage devices in uncertainty handling in energy systems and their contributions in resiliency and reliability improvement.

This book explores the role of exaptation in diverse areas of life, with examples ranging from biology to economics, social sciences and architecture. The concept of exaptation, introduced in evolutionary biology by Gould and Vrba in 1982, describes the possibility that already existing traits can be exploited for new purposes throughout the evolutionary process. Edited by three active scholars in the fields of biology, physics and economics, the book presents an interdisciplinary collection of expert viewpoints illustrating the importance of exaptation for interpreting current reality in various fields of investigation. Using the lenses of exaptation, the contributing authors show how to view the overall macroscopic landscape as comprising many disciplines, all working in unity within a single complex system. This book is the first to discuss exaptation in both hard and soft disciplines and highlights the role of this concept in understanding the birth of innovation by identifying key elements and ideas. It also offers a comprehensive guide to the emerging interdisciplinary field of exaptation, provides didactic explanations of the basic concepts, and avoids excessive jargon and heavy formalism. Its target audience includes graduate students in physics, biology, mathematics, economics, psychology and architecture; it will also appeal to established researchers in the humanities who wish to explore or enter this new science-driven interdisciplinary field.

This book examines interreligious dialogue from a European perspective. It features detailed case studies analysed from different disciplinary perspectives. These studies consider such activities as face-to-face discussion groups, public meetings, civic consultations with members of faith groups, and community action projects that bring together people from different faiths. Overall, the work reports on five years of qualitative empirical research gathered from different urban sites across four European cities (Hamburg, London, Stockholm, Oslo). It includes a comparative element which connects distinctive German, Scandinavian, and English experiences of the shared challenge of religious plurality. The contributors look at the issue through social, material, and ideological dimensions. They explore the following questions: Is interreligious dialogue the producer or product of social capital? What and how are different meanings produced and contested in places of interreligious activity? What is the function of religious thinking in different forms of interreligious activity? Their answers present a detailed analysis of the variety of practices on the ground. A firm empirical foundation supports their conclusions. Readers will learn about the changing nature of urban life through increasing pluralisation and the importance of interreligious relations in the current socio-political context. They will also gain a better understanding of the conditions, processes, function, and impact of interreligious engagement in community relations, public policy, urban planning, and practical theology.

Recent global appropriations of public spaces through urban activism, public uprising, and political protest have brought back democratic values, beliefs, and practices that have been historically associated with cities. Given the aggressive commodification of public re- sources, public space is critically important due to its capacity to enable forms of public dis- course and social practice which are fundamental for the well-being of democratic societies. Public Space Reader brings together public space scholarship by a cross-disciplinary group of academics and specialists whose essays consider fundamental questions: What is public space and how does it manifest larger cultural, social, and political processes? How are public spaces designed, socially and materially produced, and managed? How does this impact the nature and character of public experience? What roles does it play in the struggles for the just city, and the Right to The City? What critical participatory approaches can be employed to create inclusive public spaces that respond to the diverse needs, desires, and aspirations of individuals and communities alike? What are the critical global and comparative perspectives on public space that can enable further scholarly and professional work? And, what are the futures of public space in the face of global pandemics, such as COVID-19? The readers of this volume will be rewarded with an impressive array of perspectives that are bound to expand critical understanding of public space.

Since the earliest days of civilization, streets have played an important role in shaping society - but what is a street? Is it a living ecosystem, a public space, a social space, an economic space or a combination of these? The focus on automotive travel over the past century has changed the role of streets in cities. This has degraded the quality of urban life and contributed to public health issues. This book offers a unique look at streets as locations that can evolve to support the economic, social, cultural and natural aspects of cities. Using modern urban design examples, it challenges readers to focus not only on the livability and travel benefits of roads, but on how the power of streets can be harnessed. In so doing, it shapes more dynamic spaces for walking, biking and living, and aims to stimulate urban vitality and community regeneration, encouraging policymakers and individuals to make changes in their own communities.

This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair's respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London "psychogeographically" to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore's psychogeography consists of bird's-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd's aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair's conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London's disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize "London-ness" as estranging.

This book explores the decline and growth of the private rental sector in Australia delving into the changing dynamics of landlord investment and tenant profile over the course of the twentieth century and into the present period. It explains why over one in four Australian households are now private renters and investigates the contemporary legal and regulatory frameworks governing the sector. The reform discourses in Australia and comparator countries, and debates around key concerns such as Australia's advantageous tax treatment of investors in rental property and the power imbalance between tenants and landlords are highlighted. The book draws on rich data: 600 surveys and close to 100 in-depth interviews with tenants in high, medium and low rent areas in Sydney and Melbourne and regional New South Wales. The book provides in-depth insights into this large and expanding component of Australia's housing market and shows how being a private renter shapes the everyday lives and wellbeing of people and households who rent their housing including short and long-term renters, those on low and higher incomes and older as well as younger people.

This open access book traces the development of landscapes along the 414-kilometer China-Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and which is due for completion at the end of 2021. Written from the perspective of landscape architecture and intended for planners and related professionals engaged in the development and conservation of these landscapes, this book provides history, planning pedagogy and interdisciplinary framing for working alongside the often-opaque planning, design and implementation processes of large-scale infrastructure. It complicates simplistic notions of development and urbanization frequently reproduced in the Laos-China frontier region. Many of the projects and sites investigated in this book are recent "firsts" in Laos: Laos's first wildlife sanctuary for trafficked endangered species, its first botanical garden and its first planting plan for a community forest. Most often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development, the planning and design professions, including landscape architecture, have little dialogue with either the mainstream natural sciences or critical social sciences that form the discourse of projects in Laos and comparable contexts. Covering diverse conceptions and issues of development, including cultural and scientific knowledge exchanges between Laos and China, nature tourism, connectivity and new town planning, this book also features nine planning proposals for Laos generated through this research initiative since the railway's groundbreaking in 2016. Each proposal promotes a wider "landscape approach" to development and deploys landscape architecture's spatial and ecological acumen to synthesize critical development studies with the planner's capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground. Ultimately, this book advocates the cautious engagement of the professionally oriented built-environment disciplines, such as regional planning, civil engineering and landscape architecture, with the landscapes of development institutions and environmental NGOs.

Cities built on unconsolidated sediments consisting of clays, silt, peat, and sand, are particularly susceptible to subsidence. Such regions are common in delta areas, where rivers empty into the oceans, along flood plains adjacent to rivers, and in coastal marsh lands. Building cities in such areas aggravates the problem for several reasons:

1. Construction of buildings and streets adds weight to the region causing additional soil deformations.
2. Often the regions have to be drained in order to be occupied. This results in lowering of the water table and leads to hydro-compaction.
3. Often the groundwater is used as a source of water for both human consumption and industrial use.

4. Levees and dams are often built to prevent or control flooding.

Earth fissures caused by ground failure in areas of uneven or differential compaction have damaged buildings, roads and highways, railroads, flood-control structures and sewer lines. As emphasized by Barends, "in order to develop a legal framework to claims and litigation, it is essential that direct and indirect causes of land subsidence effects can be quantified with sufficient accuracy from a technical and scientific point of view."

Most existing methods and software applications treat the subsidence problem by analyzing one of the causes. This is due to the fact that the causes appear at different spatial scales. For example, over-pumping creates large scale subsidence, while building loading creates local subsidence/consolidation only.

Then, maximum permissible land subsidence (or consolidation) is a constraint in different management problems such as: groundwater management, planning of town and/or laws on building construction. It is, therefore, necessary to quantify the contribution of each cause to soil subsidence of the ground surface in cities urban area.

In this text book, we present an engineering approach based on the Biot system of equations to predict the soil settlement due to subsidence, resulting from different causes. Also we present a case study of The Bangkok Metropolitan Area (BMA).

This book features a selection of the best papers presented at two recent conferences organized by the SIEV (Italian Society of Appraisal and Valuation). Taking into account the current need for evaluative skills in order to make effective and sustainable investments, it highlights the multidisciplinary role of valuation, which opens the door for interactions with other sectors, scientific and professional fields. The book collects twenty-two papers, divided into three parts (Territory & Urban Planning, Real Estate Assets & the Construction Building Process, Real Estate Finance & Property Management) that reflect the main issues of interest for future urban development policies, namely: feasibility analysis for investments; selecting which decision support models to apply in complex contexts; enhancement of public and private assets; evaluating the effects produced by territorial investments; valuation approaches to properties; risk assessment; and strategies for monitoring energy consumption and soil sealing.

This volume gathers a selection of research contributions on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), including theoretical and methodological studies and real-world case studies. It sheds new light on the respective steps in the procedure defined in the SEA Directive from theoretical and operational standpoints, intended to enhance the sustainability of plans and programmes adopted by local, regional and national authorities. Improving the legitimacy and transparency of decision-making in the field of environmental management was one of the goals that led the European Commission (EU) to adopt Directive 2001/42/EC on the assessment of environmental programmes' effects. This book provides a multidisciplinary approach to SEA, and addresses the demand for policies and strategies to strengthen resilience through concrete measures to reduce energy consumption, mitigate pollution, promote social inclusion and create urban identity.

This book dives into the mise-en-scene of contemporary China to explore the "becoming cinema" of Chinese cities, societies, and subjectivities. Set in the wake of China's radical and rapid period of urbanization and infrastructural transformation, and situating itself in the processual city of Ningbo, the book combines empirical, ficto-critical, and philosophical methods to generate a dynamic account of everyday life as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a Realist approach that allows for different scales of analysis, the book zooms in on five architectural assemblages including: surreal real estate showrooms; a fragmented history museum; China's "first and best" Sino-foreign university; a new "Old town"; and weird gamified "any-now(here)-spaces." Together these modern arrangements and machines for living cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up greater China.

This timely Research Handbook offers new ways in which to navigate the diverse terrain of community development research. Contributions from leading experts unpack the foundations and history of community development research and look to its future, exploring innovative frameworks for conceptualizing community development. Chapters consider the trajectories and impact of global community development research, offering critical insight into the methods and frameworks that are currently being used in the field. Covering varied topics, from housing and food availability, to revitalization and faith-based regeneration, this Research Handbook provides a broad and in-depth exploration of the state of the field today. Comprehensive and unequivocally progressive, this is key reading for social and public policy researchers in need of an understanding of the current trends in community development research as well as practitioners and policymakers working on urban, rural and regional development. Contributors include: N. Al Sader, K. Anacker, C.J.L. Balsas, L.J. Beaulieu, G. Bonilla-Santiago, E.A. Dobis, B.M. Elias, K. Flowers, S. Frimpong, J. Fursova, I. Garcia, F. Handy, B. Hofstedt, J.B. Hollander, J.G. Huff Jr., M.R. Islam, S. Khademi, R. Kleinhans, R.C. Knopf, P. Kraeger, I. Kumar, R. Lewis, D. Mason, J. McGrath, A. Meshkini, M. Norouzi, M. Page, C.B. Peterson, J. Reece, K.A. Rouf, M. Roseland, A.R. Russell, R.M. Silverman, M. Spiliotopoulou, C. Sutton-Brown-Fox, C.A. Talmage, H.L. Taylor, Jr., T.D. Thomas, G.H. Tonon, L. Townsend, D.P. Varady, C. Wallace, L. Yin

This volume addresses the increase in the number of firms in mixed or residential neighbourhoods. It offers a balanced and well-informed set of contributions on this significant spatial shift. These contributions focus on how these businesses make use of the Internet, how they are affected by urban policies, how they are embedded (also in an emotional sense) in their neighbourhoods, and how work and care are combined in home-based businesses. This volume, then, provides a timely and highly relevant comprehensive view of an important phenomenon not just in the Global North but also in the Global South.' - Robert C. Kloosterman, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands'This edited volume breaks new ground by examining a neglected but important issue. Given that over half of all businesses in many advanced economies are home-based, making the connections between entrepreneurship and peoples' homes and local neighbourhoods is essential for both national policies to increase start-up rates and local policies to promote economic development. This book will be required reading for all wishing to understand how to harness the significant but untapped potential for local growth by doing so.' - Colin C. Williams, University of Sheffield, UK Entrepreneurship in Cities focuses on the neglected role of the home and the residential neighbourhood context for entrepreneurship and businesses within cities. The overall objective of the book is to develop a new interdisciplinary perspective that links entrepreneurship research with neighbourhood and urban studies. A key contribution is to show that entrepreneurship in cities is more than agglomeration economies and high-tech clusters. This is the first book to connect entrepreneurship with neighbourhoods and homes, recognising that business activity in the city is not confined to central business districts, high streets and industrial estates but is also increasingly found in residential neighbourhoods. It highlights the importance of home-based businesses for the economy of cities. These often overlooked types of businesses and workers significantly contribute to the 'buzz' that makes cities favourable places to live and work. Including interdisciplinary and international perspectives, this will be an invaluable resource for researchers and Masters students in entrepreneurship, urban studies, geography, and planning, as well as practitioners involved in urban planning and development. Contributors: N. Bailey, B. Baldauf, S.-A. Barnes, H. Behle, S. Carter, W.A.V. Clark, M. de Hoyos, C. Ekinsmyth, I. Fischer-Krapohl, F. Flogel, S. Gartner, A. Green, H. Hanhoerster, C. Mason, G. Mollenhorst, S. Mwaura, D. Reuschke, V. Schutjens, A. Southern, S. Syrett, M. van Ham, H. Verrest, B. Volker, S. Weck, G. Whittam

Engagement in the City: How Arts and Culture Impact Development in Urban Areas provides readers with numerous examples of ways that the arts can contribute to community development. Through the diverse backgrounds of its contributing authors - representing artists, art educators, and public administration scholars - the role of arts is explored as a contributing factor in strengthening communities. The book shows that the arts have the potential to positively impact a wide variety of development interests, including economic, education, health, social capital, and of cultural. The book provides strategies and techniques for implementing successful arts-based projects, whether it be through public art initiatives, service-learning opportunities, or the development or cultural districts. Cross-sectoral collaboration is a key in many of these projects, making the book beneficial for artists and community leaders who seek ways to work together to improve their cities.

This volume discusses recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in smart, internet-connected societies, highlighting three key focus areas. The first focus is on intelligent sensing applications. This section details the integration of Wireless Sensing Networks (WSN) and the use of intelligent platforms for WSN applications in urban infrastructures, and discusses AI techniques on hardware and software systems such as machine learning, pattern recognition, expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and intelligent control in transportation and communications systems. The second focus is on AI-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems, which addresses applications in traffic management, medical health, smart homes and energy. Readers will also learn about how AI can extract useful information from Big Data in IoT systems. The third focus is on crowdsourcing (CS) and computing for smart cities. this section discusses how CS via GPS devices, GIS tools, traffic cameras, smart cards, smart phones and road deceleration devices enables citizens to collect and share data to make cities smart, and how these data can be applied to address urban issues including pollution, traffic congestion, public safety and increased energy consumption. This book will of interest to academics, researchers and students studying AI, cloud computing, IoT and crowdsourcing in urban applications.

This book reviews the character and impacts of 'actually-existing' neoliberalism in Ireland. It examines the property-development boom and its legacy, the impacts of neoliberal urban policy in reshaping the city, public resistance to the new urban policy and highlights salient points to be drawn from the Irish experience of neoliberalism.