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The Elemental Metropolis: The Past and Future of the Extended Urbanity in the Yangtze River Delta, China (The Urban Book Series)

This book provides a multi-scale reading of the spatial “elements” in which the extensive urbanity in Yangtze River Delta is constructed, and from there an imagination of a new paradigm of urbanization. The urbanization in Yangtze River Delta today is in need of a new interpretation and paradigm. The delta is a territory with city cores but it also has vast dispersed urbanization where the agricultural and non-agricultural activities and spaces are mixed and interlinked, a desakota (McGee, 1991). This book attempts to answer a basic question: what is the desakota in the Yangtze River Delta made of? The research Horizontal Metropolis led by Prof. Paola Viganò at EPFL, Switzerland focuses on the form of the contemporary city – the fragmentary spatial condition and dispersed urbanity all over the world. The study on Yangtze River delta is part of its research frame.

Ecological Urbanism of Yoruba Cities in Nigeria: An Ecosystem Services Approach (Cities and Nature)

This book offers in-depth ethnographic analyses of key informants’ interviews on the ecological urbanism and ecosystem services (ES) of selected green infrastructure (GI) in Yoruba cities of Ile-Ife, Ibadan, Osogbo, Lagos, Abeokuta, Akure, Ondo, among others in Southwest Nigeria. It examines the Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) demonstrated for wellbeing through home gardens by this largest ethno-linguistic group in Nigeria. This is in addition to the ES of Osun Grove UNESCO World Heritage Site, Osogbo; Biological Garden and Park, Akure; Lekki Conservation Centre, Lagos; Adekunle Fajuyi Park, Ado-Ekiti; Muri Okunola Park, Lagos; and some institutional GI including University of Ibadan Botanical Gardens, Ibadan; Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta Botanical Garden, Abeokuta; and University of Lagos Lagoon Front Resort, Lagos, Nigeria. The study draws on theoretical praxis of Western biophilic ideologies, spirit ontologies of the Global South, and largely, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) to examine eco-cultural green spaces, home gardens, and English-types of parks and gardens as archetypes of GI in Yoruba traditional urbanism, colonial and post-colonial city planning. The book provides methods of achieving a form of modernized traditionalism as means of translating the IKS into design strategies for eco-cultural cities. The strategies are framework, model, and ethnographic design algorithms that are syntheses of the lived experiences of the key informants.

Handbook of Food Bioactive Ingredients: Properties And Applications

Trends in Urban Design: Insights for the Future Urban Professional (Contemporary Urban Design Thinking)

Urban planning practice will undergo significant changes in the upcoming decades, due to major changes and challenges the world has to deal with, such as loss of biodiversity loss, climate change impacts, agricultural transformation, water management issues and health. The way the urban professional has to relate to this new order is explored in this book by collecting a series of conversational chapters with local, regional, national and international experts in the fields of urban planning and design, urban and building development, building and construction industry, architecture, governments and academia. The unification of a desirable future with real world processes such as economic and decision-making practice is key. Moreover, the attitude of the future urban professional will more and more shift from an expert in a specific field to a communicative advisor in complex processes.

Urban and Transit Planning: City Planning: Urbanization and Circular Development (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book represents a compilation of research in sustainable architecture and planning. Its main focus is offering strategies and solutions that help reducing of the negative impacts of buildings on the environment and emphasizing the suitable management of available resources. By tackling the topic of sustainability from a historical perspective and also as a vision for the future, the book in hands provides new horizons for engineers, urban planners and environmentalists interested in the optimization of resources, space development, and the ecosystem as a whole to address the complex unresolved problems our cities are facing. This book is a culmination of selected research papers from IEREK’s sixth edition of the International Conference on Urban Planning & Architectural Design for Sustainable Development (UPADSD) held online in collaboration with the University of Florence, Italy (2021) and the first edition of the International Conference on Circular Economy for Sustainable Development (CESD) held online in collaboration with the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy (2021).

(Re)designing the Continuum of Care for Older Adults: The Future of Long-Term Care Settings

This book broadens the visioning on new care environments that are designed to be inclusive, progressive, and convergent with the needs of an aging population. The contents cover a range of long-term care (LTC) settings in a single collection to address the needs of a wide audience.Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, rethinking the spatial design of care facilities in order to prepare for future respiratory and contagious pathogens is one of the prime concerns across the globe, along with social connectedness and autonomy in care settings. This book contributes to the next generation of knowledge and understanding of the growing field of the design of technology, programs, and environments for LTC that are more effective in infection prevention and control as well as social connectedness. To address these issues, the chapters are organized in four sections: Part I: Home- and community-based care; Part II: Facility-based care; Part III: Memory care and end-of-life care; and Part IV: Evidence-based applied projects and next steps. (Re)designing the Continuum of Care for Older Adults: The Future of Long-Term Care Settings is an essential resource for researchers, practitioners, educators, policymakers, and students associated with LTC home and healthcare settings. With diverse topics in theory, substantive issues, and methods, the contributions from notable researchers and scholars cover a range of innovative programming, environments, and technologies which can impact the changing needs and support for older adults and their families across the continuum of care.

Resilient and Responsible Smart Cities: The Path to Future Resiliency (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book is a compilation of diverse, yet homogenic, research papers that discuss current advances in Earth Observation and Geospatial Information Technologies to tackle new horizons concerning the digitization and information management in smart cities’ infrastructures. The book also tackles the challenges faced by urban planners by the new mega-cities and proposes a series of solutions to resolve complex urban issues. It suggests enhancing the integration of disciplines, thus, bringing together architects, urban planners, civil engineers, landscape designers and computer scientists to address the problems that our cities are facing. This book is a culmination of selected research papers from IEREK’s fourth edition of the International Conference on Future Smart Cities (FSC) and the fourth edition of the International Conference on Resilient and Responsible Architecture and Urbanism (RRAU) held online in collaboration with the XMUM, Selangor, Malaysia (2021).

Garden Plants Taxonomy: Volume 1: Ferns, Gymnosperms, and Angiosperms (Monocots)

Horticulture has remained far behind in understanding of botanical principles. Recent phylogenetic (DNA-based) reorganization of higher plants has revolutionized taxonomic treatments of all biological entities, even when morphology does not completely agree with their organization. This book is an example of applying principals of botanical phylogenetic taxonomy to assemble genera, species, and cultivars of 200 vascular plant families of ferns, gymnosperms, and angiosperms that are cultivated for enhancement of human living space; homes, gardens, and parks. The emphases are on cultivated species but examples of some plants are often shown in the wild and in landscapes. In providing descriptions, it is assumed that students and other interested individuals have no background in general botany (plant characteristics), or nomenclature. Fundamental features of all plant groups discussed are fully illustrated by original watercolor drawings or photographs. Discussion of the families is grounded on recent botanical phylogenetic treatments, which is based on common ancestry (monophyly). Of course, phylogenetic taxonomy is not a new concept, and was originally based on morphological characteristics; it is the DNA-based phylogeny that has revolutionized modern biological classifications. In practical terms, this book represents the horticultural treatment that corresponds to phylogenetic-based botanical taxonomy, to which is added cultigens and cultivated genera and species. Hence, the harmony between horticultural and botanical taxonomy. This book covers phylogenetic-based taxonomy of Ferns, Gymnosperms, and Angiosperms (Monocots). A companion volume covers Angiosperms (Eudicots).

Advances in Architecture, Engineering and Technology: Smart Techniques in Urban Planning & Technology (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book summarizes the latest studies regarding innovation in urban design and planning. It shares many tips and insights about sustainable solutions for the issues facing transport systems, innovative digital technologies, and ICT trends. The book touches upon the need to integrate the three fields of Architecture, Engineering, and Technology that have become indispensable. This is intended to respond to the increasing human needs and population growth in cities on one hand and to develop a holistic approach that helps overcome challenges to sustainability and environment management on the other hand. With the power of engineering in practice, problems of design and development once considered too complex to be dealt with other than empirically, intuitively, or by trial and error, are now becoming more solvable and applicable. This book offers strategies and solutions that enable designers to bring together knowledge in the fields of architecture, engineering, and technology to overcome challenges facing in modern times.

Geoparticipatory Spatial Tools (Local and Urban Governance)

The book explores the key factors affecting the successful implementation of public participation spatial systems in participatory planning as part of the urban governance system. It brings insight from nation-wide research in the Czech Republic and the implications to other countries in the region and beyond. The main aim of the proposed book is to analyse the state-of-the-art of using geoparticipatory tools for citizens’ participation in community decision-making process and to suggest the effective implementation of the geoparticipatory tools available in urban governance. This book explores the situation in the Czech Republic as a representative of for Eastern Bloc country, three decades after the political transition, on its way to public participation in local and urban governance. The active involvement of the citizens into the local and urban decision making process via geoparticipatory spatial tools is becoming a popular research field among human geographers, behavioural geographers, GIS scientists, environmental psychologists, policy scientists and many others scientific areas.

Whose Green City?: Contested Urban Green Spaces and Environmental Justice in Northern Europe (Sustainable Development Goals Series)

Against the backdrop of an accelerating global urbanization and related ecological, climatic or social challenges to urban sustainability, this book focuses on the access to “safe, inclusive and accessible green and public space” as outlined in United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal No. 11. Looking through the lens of environmental justice and contested urban spaces, it raises the question who ultimately benefits from a green city development, and – even more importantly – who does not. While green space benefits are well-documented, green space provision is faced by multiple challenges in an era of urban neoliberalism. With their interdisciplinary and multi-method approach, the chapters in this book carefully study the different dimensions of green space access with particular focus on vulnerable groups, critically evaluate cases of procedural injustice and, in the case of Northern Europe that is often seen as forerunner of urban sustainability, provide in-depth studies on the contexts of injustices in urban greening. Chapters 1, 5, and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Cities’ Identity Through Architecture and Arts (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book presents works that book offer a novel interpretation of how today's urban problems can be tackled through the efficient use of resources and the modeling of solutions to best utilize the available features of cities. The second edition of this book compiles several research papers that present a detailed discussion of the formation and identification of cities and illustrate different case studies that deal with historical areas and buildings as part of preserving cities' vocabularies and self-identities. By unfolding a stimulating variety of topics in relation to the conservation of culture and identity, the book provides insights into planners and decision-makers, aiding them in their contributions to the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development goals with reference to heritage preservation.

Resilient and Responsible Smart Cities (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book gathers current research studies which explore new technologies in architecture and urban practices which ensure the efficient management of cities’ infrastructures and provide new solutions to the complex complications that may result in the tackling of challenges of population density, traffic planning, and city planning at the neighborhood scale or rather the scale of buildings and everyday life. It offers a path towards city resilience and sustainable infrastructure with the aim of meeting the demands of mega-cities. The primary audience of this book will be academics and professionals from the fields of architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, computer sciences, and mathematics. The book will aid them in their contributions to the implementation of sustainable development goals.

Innovating Strategies and Solutions for Urban Performance and Regeneration (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book focuses on enhancing urban regeneration performance and strategies that pave the way toward sustainable urban development models and solutions. The book at hand thoroughly examines the latest studies on the regeneration of urban areas and attempts at alleviating the negative impacts associated with high population density and urban heat effects. It gathers contributions that combine theoretical reflections and international case studies on urban regeneration and transformation with the single goal of tackling existing social and economic imbalances and developing new solutions. The primary audience of this book will be from the field of architecture and urban planning, offering new insights on how to address the myriad of problems that our cities are facing.

Urban and Transit Planning: Towards Liveable Communities: Urban places and Design Spaces (Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation)

This book incorporates a wealth of research focused on the more and more urgent challenges that urban planning and architectural design all over the world must cope with: from climate change to environmental decay, from an increasing urban population to an increasing poverty. In detail, this book aims at providing innovative approaches, tool and case study examples that, in line with the agenda of 2030, may better drive human settlements toward a sustainable, inclusive and resilient development. To this aim, the book includes heterogeneous regional perspectives and different methodologies and suggests development models capable of limiting further urban growth and re-shaping existing cities to improve both environmental quality and the overall quality of life of people, also taking account the more and more close relationships among urban planning and technological innovation.

Urban Agriculture for Improving the Quality of Life: Examples from Bulgaria (Urban Agriculture)

This book presents the findings of a multidisciplinary study on the effects of urban agriculture (UA) on the social, economic and environmental aspects of the quality of life in Sofia - the capital of Bulgaria. The analyses are based on a sociological survey representative of 3 districts of Sofia (among 750 people), in-depth interviews, focus groups, expert statements, ecological monitoring of UA sites, and spatial mapping of natural resources for UA. It also focuses on UA effects on the social well-being of citizens and communities, the correlation between social capital and UA attitudes, the challenges for UA to integrate disadvantaged social groups, the factors for success of small UA businesses, as well as the role of policy and civil society in developing UA. This work is also important for the analysis of the underlying links between all aspects of urban agriculture, many of which are valid beyond the local socio-economic context and environmental specifics of the city of Sofia.

Designing Sustainable Factories: A Toolkit for the Assessment and Mitigation of Impact on the Landscape (Advances in Global Change Research #72)

Economic constraints and lack of knowledge often prevent companies - especially small and medium enterprises - from harmonizing their facilities with the landscape. As a result, factories significantly impact the quality of our living environment, in terms of physical effects on the ecosystem, perceptual interferences with the surroundings, and disturbances on local communities. At both the design and maintenance stages, a set of appropriate tools can assist businesses in becoming more aware of their impacts and identifying possible mitigation strategies. The book presents an assessment tool and a library of inspiring design tactics for factories, with examples of the benefits and synergies for the environment, the scenery, the community, and the company itself. The purpose is to elicit more than a simple reflection about what a sustainable factory entails. It is rather to encourage and assist both businesses and designers in mitigating the impact of industrial facilities on the landscape as holistically as possible.

Adaptive Urban Transformation: Urban Landscape Dynamics, Regional Design and Territorial Governance in the Pearl River Delta, China (The Urban Book Series)

This open access book provides a cross-sectoral, integrative and multi-scale design and planning approach for adaptive urban transformation of fast urbanising deltas, taking the Pearl River Delta (China) as a case study. Deltaic areas are among the most promising regions in the world. Their strategic location and superior quality of their soils are core factors supporting both human development and the rise of these regions as global economic hubs. At the same time, however, deltas are extremely vulnerable to multiple threats from both climate change and urbanisation. These include an increased flood risk combined with the resulting loss of ecological and social-cultural values. To ensure a more sustainable future for these areas, spatial strategies are needed to strengthen resilience, i.e. help the systems to cope with their vulnerabilities as well as enhance their capacity to overcome natural and artificial threats.The book provides a unique approach that integrates research in urban landscape systems, territorial governance and visualisation techniques that will help to achieve more integrated and resilient deltas. Based on an assessment of the dynamics of change regarding the transformational cycles of natural and urban landscape elements, eco-dynamic regional design strategies are explored to reveal greater opportunities for the exploitation of natural and social-cultural factors within the processes of urban development.

Nature-based Solutions for Sustainable Urban Planning: Greening Cities, Shaping Cities (Contemporary Urban Design Thinking)

Urban greening policies and measures have recently shown a high potential impact on the design and reshaping of the built environment, especially in urban regeneration processes. This book provides insights on analytical methods, planning strategies and shared governance tools for successfully integrating Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in the urban planning practice. The selected contributions present real-life application cases, in which the mainstreaming of NBS are investigated according to two main challenges: the planning and designing of physical and spatial integration of NBS in cities on one side, and the implementation of suitable shared governance models and co-creation pathways on the other. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Mandala Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology: Interpreting classic Indian texts and Vaastupurusha mandala as a framework for organizing towns

Classic Indian texts and Vaastupurusha Mandala are not often discussed in the western discourse on urbanism, even while much of these predate the commonly taught European writings. This book sheds light on some of those forgotten concepts, thus making the lesser discussed classic Indian town organization ideas accessible to architecture, landscape, and urban planning students worldwide. The resonance of these concepts in present times are reviewed through case studies of select Hindu temple towns in India. Furthermore, the author underscores the formal abstraction of the classic Indian Mandala and transplants the discourse from sociology to socio-ecologically adept trans-disciplinary design thinking. The creative interpretations offer a premise to start revising classic models for current practice to influence the urbanism and ecology of a place in accordance with the changing climate.

State of the Art in Ethiopian Church Forests and Restoration Options

This book, with contributions from leading academics - and including reviews and case studies from Ethiopian Church forests - provides a valuable reference for advanced students and researchers interested in forest and other natural resource management, ecology and ecosystem services as well as restoration options. The book addresses various aspects including a general overview of Ethiopian church forests, the present role and future challenges of church forests. It also discusses their structure and diversity in the context of sustainability and discusses restoration options for surrounding landscapes, under consideration of the circumstances of the land and the needs of surrounding communities. The intended readership includes natural resource professionals in general as well as forestry professionals in particular (practitioners, policymakers, educators and researchers). The book will provide the reader with a good foundation for understanding Ethiopian forest resources and restoration options of degraded landscape.

Liberty and Landscape: In Search of Life Chances with Ralf Dahrendorf

This book ​explores the importance of freedom and liberalism in the context of socialities, individualities and materialities. The authors provide a highly unusual and innovative blending of concepts about space and landscape through a deeply theoretical exploration of liberalism.Liberalism is often problematized in contemporary discussions with regard to gentrification, environmental problems and inequality. In contrast, this book refers to a liberalism that maximizes life chances in the context of dealing with spaces. A connection between freedom and space, based on liberal ideas, provides a much needed theoretical intervention in the fields of social and spatial sciences.

Current Challenges in Architecture and Urbanism in Albania (The Urban Book Series)

This book aims to provide a cross-sectorial assessment in a multidisciplinary and trans-cultural context onto the innovations in urban and architectural approaches in designing next human environments within the Albanian context. The continuous concentration of the world population in the urban areas and their consequent densification require even more quantity of quality spaces and places, integrated resources and energies, alternative modalities of mobility and transports, demand of social inclusion and need for a circular economy. These have become the major challenges for this 21st Century and some of the greatest problems facing humanity in most of current vision for the future. The main objective is to feed a debate about the emerging trans-cultural (and trans-national) approaches in the whole designing field, from Albanian context and its current good practices, attempts and faults, both formal and informal. Thus, the Albanian experience may represent an opportunity through which we all may reflect about how designing is evolving in the Mediterranean arena of “praxis and experiments” aimed to a better quality of life at the human scale and in expanding the concepts of “place and space” such as it has improved by the effects in designing innovations.This book represents a useful read of theories, experiences and case studies, which can help in enlarging reflection on how the designing practice is evolving in the arena of forthcoming development strategies and tactics, all addressed to improve the quality of life, places and spaces. Additionally, it provides a range of architecture and urban design rationales and strategies for reinforcing identities and creating memorable places within the quality of contemporary architecture and urbanism. It addresses the unique needs of architects and planners to deal with topics that cut across social, economic and environmental issues and shows readers how to explore methods, theoretical frameworks and techniques to address the complex needs of architecture, urban and cultural development.

Urban Services to Ecosystems: Green Infrastructure Benefits from the Landscape to the Urban Scale (Future City #17)

The aim of this book is to bring together multidisciplinary research in the field of green infrastructure design, construction and ecology. The main core of the volume is constituted by contributions dealing with green infrastructure, vegetation science, nature-based solutions and sustainable urban development. The green infrastructure and its ecosystem services, indeed, are gaining space in both political agendas and academic research. However, the attention is focused on the services that nature is giving for free to and for human health and survival. What if we start to see things from another perspective? Our actions shall converge for instance to turn man-made environment like cities from heterotrophic to autotrophic ecosystems. From landscape ecology to urban and building design, like bricks of a wall, from the small scale to the bigger landscape scale via ecological networks and corridors, we should start answering these questions: what are the services that are we offering to Nature? What are we improving? How to implement our actions? This book contains three Open Access chapters, which are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Metropolitan Landscapes: Towards a Shared Construction of the Resilient City of the Future (Landscape Series #28)

This edited volume covers many aspects of the Metropolitan Landscapes. Solutions are needed to meet the demand of the citizens of a renewed metropolitan region landscape. It opens up discussions about possible toolkits for strategic actions based on understanding the territory from geographical, urban, architectural, economic, environmental, and public policy perspectives. This book intends to promote the Metropolitan dwelling quality, ensuring human well-being proposing a discussion on the resilient articulation of the interface space among the city's infrastructure, agriculture, and nature.This book results from the Symposium: Metropolitan Landscapes that MSLab of the Politecnico di Milano and ETSA (Sevilla) organized at the IALE 2019 Conference (Milan, July 2019) to manage radical territory transformation with a strategic vision. The widespread growth of urban areas indicates the importance of building resilient sustainable cities capable of minimizing climate-change impact production.The Symposium aimed to discuss the Urban Metabolism approach considering the combination of Landscapes set in a single Metropolitan Ecosystem. Accordingly, new design strategies of transformation, replacement or maintenance can compose Urban-Rural Linkage patterns and a decalage of different landscape contexts. Ecological interest in environmental sustainability, compatibility, and resilience is not tied exclusively to the balance between production and energy consumption. Thus, it is the integration over time and at several scales of the urban and rural landscapes and their inhabitants that nourish the Metropolitan Bioregion.Moreover, the Metropolitan Landscape Book's research hypothesis is the need for a Glossary, strengthening the basis of understanding Metropolitan Landscape's complexity.This book's topic is particularly relevant to Landscape Urbanism, Architecture, Urban disciplines Scholars, Students and Practitioners who want to be connected in a significant way with Metropolitan Discipline’s research field.