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This book asks how thinking, governing, performing, and producing the urban differently can assist in enabling the creation of alternative urban futures. It is a timely response to the ongoing crises and pressing challenges that inhabitants of cities, towns, and villages worldwide are faced with in the midst of what has been widely dubbed as ‘an urban age’. Starting from the premise that current urban development patterns are unsustainable in every sense of the word, the book explores how alternative patterns can be pursued by the wide variety of actors – from governments and international institutions to slum-dwellers and social movements – involved in the on-going production of our...
Alternative urban spaces across civic, private, and public spheres emerge in response to the great challenges that urban actors are currently confronted with. Labour markets are changing rapidly, the availability of affordable housing is under intensifying pressure, and public spaces have become battlegrounds of urban politics. This edited collection brings together contributors in order to spark an international dialogue about the production of alternative urban spaces through a threefold exploration of alternative spaces of work, dwelling, and public life. Seeking out and examining existing alternative urban spaces, the authors identify the elements that provide opportunities to create rad...
Recent research suggests that rural residents in the global North are happier than urban populations in the same countries. This goes against received wisdom in the field, where the opposite is usually assumed. Is quality of life better in the rural areas? How and under which circumstances is this the case? What can we learn from digging deeper into the rural-urban happiness paradox and which critical questions does this leave us with for the future? What might policymakers, planners, architects, and other decision-makers learn about how, when, and where to intervene? Rural quality of life delves deeper into these matters by asking what quality of life in rural areas is all about - in everyday life, through interventions in the built environment, in civil society and measures of subjective well-being.
Post-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the »spatial turn« in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationalism as radical approach to urban studies. This approach enables us to think about space not only as socially produced, but also as crucially marked by conflict, radical negativity, and absence. The contributors undertake a (re-)reading of key spatial and/or post-foundational theorists to introduce their respective understandings of politics and space, and offer examples of post-foundational empirical analyses of urban protests, spatial occupation, and everyday life.
This book explores the dynamics of place, location and territories from the perspective of an experience-based economy. It offers a valuable contribution to this new approach and the planning and management challenges it faces. This book emphasises three key avenues to understanding the experience economy. First, the book reconsiders innovation processes and the relationship between the consumption and production of experience value. Second, it considers emerging forms of governance related to experience-based development in businesses and cities. Third, it examines the role of place as a value, resource and outcome of experiential innovation and planning. This book will be of interested to researchers concerned with urban and regional development.
This authoritative Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research into urban politics and policy in cities across the globe. Leading scholars examine the position of urban politics within political science and analyse the critical approaches and interdisciplinary pressures that are broadening the field.
In this collection, researchers analyze rural societies, economies, and governance in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia through the lens of rights and citizenship, across such varied domains as education, employment, and health. The provocative concept of a "right to be rural" illuminates not only the challenges faced by rural communities worldwide, but also underappreciated facets of community resilience in the face of these challenges. The book's central question—"is there a right to be rural?"—offers insights into how these communities are created, maintained, and challenged. The authors illustrate that citizenship rights have a spatial character, and that this observation is cr...
This interdisciplinary book explores how CO2 can become a resource instead of a waste and, as such, be a tool to meet one of the grandest challenges humanity is facing: climate change. Drawing on a Norwegian narrative that has significance for a global audience, Øyvind Stokke and Elin Oftedal introduce in-depth, multi-perspective analyses of a sustainable innovation research experiment in industrial carbon capture and utilisation technologies. Building on extensive literature within marine sciences, sustainability research, and environmental philosophy and ethics, this book documents how a misplaced resource like CO2 can become valuable within a circular economy in its own right, while at t...
The history of China dates back thousands of years, with periods of decline followed by periods of growth and innovation. This book puts the last 50 years – China's most recent period of growth – into perspective. It explores the changing national and international connections within China and between China and other parts of the world, and their importance for understanding the past, current, and future developments of the Chinese economy. The book brings together leading international contributors from China, Japan and Europe to consider the historical developments of these connections, the importance of natural and man-made connections for the Chinese economy, the role of institutions and policies for understanding the connections and their sustainability. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers focusing on China, economics, geography or international trade.
In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While "smart city" advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms and vulnerability to cyberattack. This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable...