This book on urban water bodies, catchment areas and drainage pattern is set against the backdrop of the unprecedented heavy rainfall that severely deluged metropolitan cities and other parts of India in recent years. It discusses how the processes and implementation of colonial urban development policies and projects have radically transformed the water bodies and their catchment areas - traditional water holding systems of Varanasi city. In this imperative colonial process, through the case study of Varanasi, the book mainly engages with the reasons behind the elimination of the temple tanks and ponds after the annexation of Varanasi by the British from 1775 till 1947. The book investigates the colonial notion of 'dry city', and how this notion crafted the process of separating land and water bodies, which arguably resulted in the reclamation and draining of water bodies, and also gave rise to water pollution. Additionally, the book analyzes the elimination of water bodies and loss of catchment areas through the ongoing processes of restoring the ancient city's natural and cultural heritage. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

This book investigates changing geographies of fast growing Asian metropolitan regions, in particular their peripheral areas. Through examining the intersection of global suburbanisation and Asian urbanism, the book depicts a complex (sub)urban world in Asia. It explains how the forces of globalisation, the logic of capital accumulation, and the history of rural-urban divide and interaction, path-dependent local institutions, and government policies work together to reshape the geographies of Asian urbanism. Touching on social, environmental, governance and planning aspects of contemporary urban Asia, the chapters in this volume provide grounded studies of residential relocation and changing rural settlements, property development by a congregation of developers, political ecologies of water provision, middle-class consumers, and local state agencies, transit-oriented development and infrastructure finance in peri-urban areas. It demonstrates an assemblage of actors and coexistence of multiple urban governance regimes with everyday negotiations. Changing Asian Urban Geographies will be interesting not only to those who wish to know more about Asian urban geographies but also to scholars and students wishing to see Asian metropolises in a comparative perspective of (sub)urban dynamics. The chapters in this book were originally published in Urban Geography.

This book presents recent innovative trends in land, water and energy management in Vietnam. Presenting the main projects and outcomes of a close collaboration between Italian and Vietnamese researchers in the last three years, the book is divided into three main sections: environment, climate change and land management in Vietnam; energy for Vietnam; and cities and utilities in Vietnam. The first section focuses on water systems, including rivers and seacoasts, and on new growing methods for more sustainable agriculture. The second section addresses energy and wastewater. The country's rapid growth is a major challenge in terms of reinforcing the electrical infrastructures, and as such this section offers an overview of the government's planned measures and their impact on the Vietnamese power system. The third section highlights cities and utilities in the context of increasing urbanization, exploring the urban morphology of the Vietnamese metropolis, particularly Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

The book offers a novel approach to the study of the complex dynamics of cities. It is based on (1) Synergetics as a science of cooperation and selforganization, (2) information theory including semantic and pragmatic aspects, and optimization principles, (3) a theory of steady state maintenance, and of (4) phase transition, i.e. qualitative changes of structure or behavior. From this novel theoretical vantage point, the book addresses particularly three issues that stand at the core of current discourse on cities: Urban Scaling, Smart Cities and City Planning. An important consequence of "the 21st century as the age of cities", is that the study of cities currently attracts scientists from a variety of disciplines, ranging from physics, mathematics and computer science, through urban studies, architecture, planning and human geography, to economics, psychology, sociology, public administration and more. The book is thus likely to attract scholars, researchers and students of these research domains, of complexity theories of cities, as well as of general complexity theory. In addition, it is directed also to practitioners of urbanism, city planning and urban design.

This book explores the contributions of psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical perspectives to the design of contemporary cities. Pursuing an innovative and multidisciplinary approach, it addresses the need to re-launch knowledge and creativity as major cultural and institutional bases of human communities. Dwelling is a form of knowledge and re-invention of reality that involves both the tangible dimension of physical places and their mental representation. Findings in the neuroscientific field are increasingly opening stimulating perspectives on the design of spaces, and highlight how our ability to understand other people is strongly related to our corporeity. The first part of the book focuses on the contributions of various disciplines that deal with the spatial dimension, and explores the dovetailing roles that science and art can play from a multidisciplinary perspective. In turn, the second part formulates proposals on how to promote greater integration between the aesthetic and cultural dimension in spatial design. Given its scope, the book will benefit all scholars, academics and practitioners who are involved in the process of planning, designing and building places, and will foster an international exchange of research, case studies, and theoretical reflections to confront the challenges of designing conscious places and enable the development of communities.

This book explores how cities are shaped by the lived experiences of inhabitants and examines the ways they develop strategies to cope with daily and unexpected challenges. It argues that migration, livelihood, and public health challenges result from inadequacies in the hard city-urban assets, such as land, infrastructure and housing, and asserts that these challenges and escalating vulnerabilities are best negotiated using the soft city-social capital and community networks. In so doing, the authors criticise a singular knowledge system and argue for a granular, nuanced understanding of cities-of the interrelations between people in places, everyday urbanisms, social relationships, cultural practices and histories. The volume presents perspectives from the Global South and the Global North, and engages with city-specific cases from Africa, India and Europe for a deeper understanding of resilience. Part of the Urban Futures series, it will be of great interest to students and researchers of urban studies, urban planning, urban management, architecture, urban sociology, urban design, ecology, conservation, and urban sustainability. It will also be useful for urbanists, architects, urban sociologists, city and town planners and those interested in a deeper understanding of the contemporary and future city.

This book explores how cities are shaped by the lived experiences of inhabitants and examines the ways they develop strategies to cope with daily and unexpected challenges. It argues that migration, livelihood, and public health challenges result from inadequacies in the hard city-urban assets, such as land, infrastructure and housing, and asserts that these challenges and escalating vulnerabilities are best negotiated using the soft city-social capital and community networks. In so doing, the authors criticise a singular knowledge system and argue for a granular, nuanced understanding of cities-of the interrelations between people in places, everyday urbanisms, social relationships, cultural practices and histories. The volume presents perspectives from the Global South and the Global North, and engages with city-specific cases from Africa, India and Europe for a deeper understanding of resilience. Part of the Urban Futures series, it will be of great interest to students and researchers of urban studies, urban planning, urban management, architecture, urban sociology, urban design, ecology, conservation, and urban sustainability. It will also be useful for urbanists, architects, urban sociologists, city and town planners and those interested in a deeper understanding of the contemporary and future city.

The struggle for the right to housing is a battle over property rights and land use. For housing to be provided as a human need, land must be recognised as a common right. Property, Planning and Protest is a compelling new investigation into public opposition to housing and real estate development. Its innovative materialist approach is grounded in the political economy of land value and it recognises conflict between communities and real estate capital as a struggle over land and property rights. Property, Planning and Protest is about a social movement struggling for democratic representation in land use decisions. The amenity groups it describes champion a democratic plan-led system that allocates land for social and environmental goals. Situating this movement in a history of land reform and common rights, this book sets out a persuasive new vision of democratic planning and contributes a powerful insight into the global affordability crisis in housing.

Julie Ren investigates the motivations and practices of making art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research, beyond its significance as a critical intervention. Across vastly different contexts, where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, she innovatively explores the ways that art spaces employ creative capital to sustain themselves in a competitive urban landscape. She shows how these art spaces are embedded within a politics of aspiration and demonstrates that aspiration is an important lens through which to understand the nature of, and possibilities for, urban change.

Untangling Smart Cities: From Utopian Dreams to Innovation Systems for a Technology-Enabled Urban Sustainability helps all key stakeholders understand the complex and often conflicting nature of smart city research, offering valuable insights for designing and implementing strategies to improve the smart city decision-making processes. The book drives the reader to a better theoretical and practical comprehension of smart city development, beginning with a thorough and systematic analysis of the research literature published to date. It addition, it provides an in-depth understanding of the entire smart city knowledge domain, revealing a deeply rooted division in its cognitive-epistemological structure as identified by bibliometric insights. Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between theory and practice using case study research and empirical evidence drawn from cities considered leaders in innovative smart city practices.

Depopulation, Deindustrialisation and Disasters are three of the biggest problems facing Japan today. This book discusses how sustainable communities are being created in Japan in an attempt to overcome the threat of the triple Ds . It provides an overview of how each of these three core issues endangers the sustainability of local communities especially, but also discusses how they might also provide an opportunity to replace outdated paradigms, rooted in expansion and competition, with a new way forward on a global scale. The authors explore how the Japanese government has followed the worldwide trend of implementing neo-liberal policies in response to globalisation and how these policies have resulted in a mass exodus into larger cities such as Tokyo, leaving local communities more vulnerable to socio-economic threats. The authors highlight non-metropolitan areas facing the 'triple D' threat and introduce several case studies on how these are working towards achieving a more sustainable future. Written by members of the LORC (Research Centre for the Local Public Human Resources and Policy Development, Ryukoku University) this collection will be invaluable to scholars across the social and political sciences and to those interested in how innovative policy making can positively influence sustainable development.

This book highlights various designs for urban green spaces and their functions. It provides an interesting meeting point between Asian, European and North America specialists (researchers, planners, landscape architects) studying urban biodiversity; urban biodiversity and green space; relations between people and biodiversity. The most important feature of this book is the unique point of view from each contributor towards "the relationship between nature and people in urban areas", in the context of the ecosystem and biodiversity in urban areas and how to manage them. All chapters explore and consider the relationship between humans and nature in cities, a subject which is taking on increasing importance as new cities are conceptualized and planned. These discussion and examples would be useful for urban ecology researchers, biologists, city planners, government staff working in city planning, architects, landscape architects, and university instructors. This book can also be used as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate city planning, architecture or landscape architecture courses.

This book provides new dimensions and a contemporary focus on sustainable transport, urban regeneration and development in eight countries spanning four continents at different stages of development. It examines the role of transit oriented development (TOD) in improving urban sustainability and providing different transport choices, exploring how these can be implemented in modern cities. Establishing a new agenda for TOD, experts in the field critically evaluate the links between urban transport investment and economic, social and environmental sustainability, introducing new methods of analysis. Chapters explore international dimensions of TOD, providing crucial insight to issues such as uneven development, transport emissions, global warming, car dependence and the challenge of powering vehicles with sustainable fuels. Urban and regional planning, transport studies and environmental management scholars seeking to understand urban sustainability issues will benefit from this timely book. It will also prove to be a valuable read for urban planners and research consultants looking to widen their knowledge of the role of TOD in enhancing urban sustainability.

COVID-19 in Brooklyn: Everyday Life During a Pandemic looks closely at the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the lives of ordinary people living in the super-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope and Greenpoint/Williamsburg, where the authors hunkered down during the 2020 lockdown. Putting their private lives into broader scientific and public contexts, Krase and DeSena discuss a wide range of research methods and theories, as well as print and internet media sources about the pandemic. With words and images, the scholar-activist authors place their own personal experiences and those of their family and neighbors inside the broader context of global and national medical emergencies, as well as related economic, social, and political unrest, such as widespread unemployment, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the contentious 2020 presidential election. Using a distributive social justice perspective and examining their own privileges, they discover and discuss the racial and economic inequities that affected the lives of other Brooklynites. These disparities included public health measures and lack of access to basic necessities of urban living. The book also addresses the cultural and economic shifts that took place at the start of the pandemic and contemplate how those forces will impact on future urban life, asking what the "new normal" of business, entertainment, education, housing, and work will look like locally and globally. This richly illustrated book offers an invaluable local study of the impact of the pandemic on ordinary people in Brooklyn. As such, it will be of great interest to students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

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

Smart Cities: Issues and Challenges: Mapping Political, Social and Economic Risks and Threats serves as a primer on smart cities, providing readers with no prior knowledge on smart cities with an understanding of the current smart cities debates. Gathering cutting-edge research and insights from academics, practitioners and policymakers around the globe, it identifies and discusses the nascent threats and challenges contemporary urban areas face, highlighting the drivers and ways of navigating these issues in an effective manner. Uniquely providing a blend of conceptual academic analysis with empirical insights, the book produces policy recommendations that boost urban sustainability and resilience.

This book elaborates the need, in a rapidly urbanizing world, for recognition of the ecological communities we inhabit in cities and for the development of an ethics for all entities (human and non-human) in this context. Children and their entangled relations with the human and more-than-human world are located centrally to the research on cities in Bolivia and Kazakhstan, which investigates the future challenges of the Anthropocene. The author explores these relations by employing techniques of intra-action, diffraction and onto-ethnography in order to reveal the complexities of children's lives. These tools are supported by a theoretical framing that draws on posthumanist and new materialist literature. Through rich and complex stories of space-time-mattering in cities, this work connects children's voices with a host of others to address the question of what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene.

Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Property provides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.

This book provides critical insight into the experience of multi-owned property, and showcases different cultural responses across the Asia-Pacific region. Escalating demand for properties within global cities has created exuberance around apartment living; however less well understood are the restrictions on individual rights and responsibilities associated with collective living. In contrast to the highly populated and traditional communal housing arrangements of past Asian economies, we see an increasing focus on neo-liberalist, market-based policies associated with the rise of an Asian middle class shaping structural change from communal to individualistic. This edited collection unpacks the rights, restrictions and responsibilities of multi-owned property ownership across the Asia-Pacific region; examining the experiences of developers, strata-managers, owners and residents. In doing so, they highlight how the rights of one party affects the restrictions and responsibilities of others within different policy frameworks. This work will reach an interdisciplinary audience including scholars and practitioners of sociology, public policy, urban studies and planning, economics, property management and architecture.

This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a fresh, accessible and case-based discussion on the emergence of digitally-enabled social innovation practices in Europe that are redesigning the urban space and challenging the consolidated urban governance processes. By adopting a critical geography perspective, this ground-breaking analysis of digital social innovation provides the reader with an accessible overview of the way in which urban reproductive processes mobilise the physical and the virtual dimensions of the city and generate distinctive spatial configurations. Together with novel urban narratives and socio-technical imaginaries, these support the existing geometries of power or construct new ones. The author clearly describes contemporary cities as the new battlegrounds for controlling the digital sphere, shaped by the interplay between digital capitalism and resistance movements. In light of grassroots initiatives advanced by cyber-activists, e-makers and hackers, the book unveils the socio-political and cultural underpinnings of the revolution produced by the digital social innovations in the city and the socio-technological regimes supporting them. This author successfully sheds new critical light on traditional innovation studies exploring the debate on digital innovation through the lens of social and cultural geography providing an invaluable reference for those working in this field.

This book systematically investigates the strategy and practice of comprehensive land consolidation in China by assessing the objective of the program and its implementation. In the first part of the book, the authors first review the development and historical policy of land consolidation and land rehabilitation, with a focus on initiatives inaugurated in China since the 1980s. The following three chapters analyze different modes, approaches, and measures of land consolidation. The second part focuses on planning patterns designed and implemented in different territorial and geographical regions in China, including urban and rural areas, ecological function zones, mining areas, and coastal regions and islands. It also looks into the institutional basis, supportive measures, and mechanisms for the coordinated regional implementation of land consolidation at the macro, medium, and micro levels. Based on their findings, the authors advance ten actionable policy suggestions on the promotion of China's land consolidation. The title will appeal to scholars, students, and policy makers interested in economic management, land planning, and natural resources management.

This volume brings together the world's leading experts on urban and transport planning, environmental exposures, physical activity, health and health impact assessment to discuss challenges and solutions in cities. The book provides a conceptual framework and work program for actions and outlines future research needs. It presents the current evidence-base, the benefits of and numerous case studies on integrating health and the environment into urban development and transport planning. Within cities there is a considerable variation in the levels of environmental exposures such as ambient air pollution, noise, and temperature, green space availability and physical activity. Many of these exposures, and their adverse health impacts, are related to and are being exacerbated by urban and transport planning and policy. Emerging research suggests that urban and transport planning indicators such as road network, distance to major roads, traffic density, household density, industry, and natural and green space can explain a large proportion of the variability in environmental exposures and therefore represent important and highly modifiable factors. The urban environment is a complex interlinked system. Decision-makers need not only better data on the complexity of factors in environmental and developmental processes affecting human health, but also an enhanced understanding of the linkages between these factors and health effects to determine at which level to target their actions most effectively. In recent years, there also has been a shift from trying to change at the national level to more comprehensive and ambitious actions being developed and implemented at the regional and local levels. Cities have come to the forefront of providing solutions for environmental issues such as climate change, which has co-benefits for health, but yet need better knowledge for wider health-centric action. This book provides the latest and most up-to-date information and studies for academics and practitioners alike.

Advances in high spatial resolution mapping capabilities and the new rules established by the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States for the operation of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) have provided new opportunities to acquire aerial data at a lower cost and more safely versus other methods. A similar opening of the skies for sUAS applications is being allowed in countries across the world. Also, sUAS can access hazardous or inaccessible areas during disaster events and provide rapid response when needed. Applications of Small Unmanned Aircraft systems: Best Practices and Case Studies is the first book that brings together the best practices of sUAS applied to a broad range of issues in high spatial resolution mapping projects. Very few sUAS pilots have the knowledge of how the collected imagery is processed into value added mapping products that have commercial and/or academic import. Since the field of sUAS applications is just a few years old, this book covers the need for a compendium of case studies to guide the planning, data collection, and most importantly data processing and map error issues, with the range of sensors available to the user community. Written by experienced academics and professionals, this book serves as a guide on how to formulate sUAS based projects, from choice of a sUAS, flight planning for a particular application, sensors and data acquisition, data processing software, mapping software and use of the high spatial resolution maps produced for particular types of geospatial modeling. Features: Focus on sUAS based data acquisition and processing into map products Broad range of case studies by highly experienced academics Practical guidance on sUAS hardware, sensors, and software utilized Compilation of workflow insights from expert professors and professionals Relevant to academia, government, and industry Positional and thematic map accuracy, UAS curriculum development and workflow replicability issues This book would be an excellent text for upper-level undergraduate to graduate level sUAS mapping application courses. It is also invaluable as a reference for educators designing sUAS based curriculum as well as for potential sUAS users to assess the scope of mapping projects that can be done with this technology.

This book has one central theme: how, in the United Kingdom, can we create better cities and towns in which to live and work and play? What can we learn from other countries, especially our near neighbours in Europe? And, in turn, can we provide lessons for other countries facing similar dilemmas? Urban Britain is not functioning as it should. Social inequalities and regional disparities show little sign of going away. Efforts to generate growth, and spread it to the poorer areas of cities, have failed dismally. Much new urban development and redevelopment is not up to standard. Yet there are cities in mainland Europe, which have set new standards of high-quality sustainable urban development. This book looks at these best-practice examples - in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Scandinavia, - and suggests ways in which the UK and other countries could do the same. The book is in three parts. Part 1 analyses the main issues for urban planning and development - in economic development and job generation, sustainable development, housing policy, transport and development mechanisms - and probes how practice in the UK has fallen short. Part Two embarks on a tour of best-practice cities in Europe, starting in Germany with the country's boosting of its cities' economies, moving to the spectacularly successful new housing developments in the Netherlands, from there to France's integrated city transport, then to Scandinavia's pursuit of sustainability for its cities, and finally back to Germany, to Freiburg - the city that 'did it all'. Part Three sums up the lessons of Part Two and sets out the key steps needed to launch a new wave of urban development and regeneration on a radically different basis.

Originally published in 1979. In this forcefully argued book, Milton Santos shows that contemporary explanations of urbanization and spatial organization in underdeveloped countries are inadequate. This failure is attributable to their origins in theories elaborated to explain the development of advanced Western societies. Santos' work provides the basis for the new theory which is so badly needed. He describes the urban economy in these countries in terms of two circuits of activity - an upper circuit consisting of those enterprises and structures which are based on modern technology and are oriented towards the advanced capitalist world, and a lower circuit comprised of more traditional processes and forms of exchange. The dialectical interaction of these two circuits is seen to generate the patterns of growth, forms of State intervention and, above all, the spatial organization characteristic of Third World economies. This was a revision and translation of L'Espace Partage (1975).