This proceedings addresses the challenges of urbanization that gravely affect the world's ecosystems. To become efficiently sustainable and regenerative, buildings and cities need to adopt smart solutions. This book discusses innovations of the built environment while depicting how such practices can transform future buildings and urban areas into places of higher value and quality. The book aims to examine the interrelationship between people, nature and technology, which is essential in pursuing smart environments that optimize human wellbeing, motivation and vitality, as well as promoting cohesive and inclusive societies: Urban Sociology - Community Involvement - Place-making and Cultural Continuity - Environmental Psychology - Smart living - Just City. The book presents exemplary practical experiences that reflect smart strategies, technologies and innovations, by established and emerging professionals, provides a forum of real-life discourse. The primary audience for the work will be from the fields of architecture, urban planning and built-environment systems, including multi-disciplinary academics as well as professionals.

This work represents an investigation of the roles of specular and diffuse reflections in urban noise propagation with a view towards developing a simple predictive technique for long distance propagation. It is established that models based only on specular reflection and surface absorption are not sufficiently accurate to explain measured data as scattering of sound by building facades is significant. A computer model of sound propagation in a simple street was developed to take account of the probabilities associated with the branching nature of the reflection history. A simplified theory was developed incorporating an effective diffusion coefficient which increases with the order of reflection to take account of all the mixed specular-diffuse interactions. Two experimental techniques have been developed for measuring the diffusion coefficient of street facades and applied to a scale model experiment. The results obtained for values of diffusion coefficient showed the expected trend with increasing the facade irregularities.