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Recent years have seen a gathering interest in the importance of real estate development to the growth and development of cities. This has included theoretical work on such topics as land rent and property rights as well as empirical studies on property investments, assetization, securitization, and the effects of changing property values on economic growth and the global status of cities. In the field of urban political economy, attention has turned particularly to the financialization of land and the built environment and to the globalization of property ownership, real estate development, and architectural design. This edited volume brings together a collection of original investigations ...
This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice and activism, and human moral responsibility for the environment, these contributions demonstrate that beauty is not only a meaningful dimension of our experience, but also a powerful strategy for inspiring cultural transformation. Taken as a whole, they underscore the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to the ecocritical project and the concern for beauty that motivates effective social and political engagement.
All cities are vulnerable. They have economically, socially, institutionally vulnerable urban space. In developing countries, vulnerable urban space can be observed typically as substandard informal settlements such as slums or areas occupied by squatters. At present, slum dwellers comprise one-third of the world's urban population of 3 billion, and it has been estimated that the number of slum dwellers will double in the next 30 years if no effective action is taken. Improvement of vulnerable urban areas, which is one of the targets of Millennium Development Goals, is thus an urgent worldwide challenge in our age. This book combines empirical and comparative analysis of improvement of vulnerable urban space and post-disaster rehabilitation in Asian and Latin American countries. The discussions presented herein will serve as a useful, thought-provoking source for researchers, practitioners and students, especially for those who are working to alleviate the vulnerability of urban space.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is the most extensive study ever of the linkages between the world's ecosystems and human well-being. It is one of the most important conservation initiatives ever undertaken, and the ecosystem services paradigm on which it is based provides the standard for practice. This manual supplies the specific tools that practitioners of the paradigm need in order to extend their work into the future. The manual is a stand-alone "how to" guide to conducting assessments of the impacts on humans of ecosystem changes. It builds on the experiences and lessons learned from the MA global and sub-global assessment initiatives, with chapters written by well-known participants in those initiatives. It also includes insights gained from service-focused assessment activities since the completion of the MA in 2005.
Urbanization is a global phenomenon and the book emphasizes that this is not just a social-technological process. It is also a social-ecological process where cities are places for nature, and where cities also are dependent on, and have impacts on, the biosphere at different scales from local to global. The book is a global assessment and delivers four main conclusions: Urban areas are expanding faster than urban populations. Half the increase in urban land across the world over the next 20 years will occur in Asia, with the most extensive change expected to take place in India and China Urban areas modify their local and regional climate through the urban heat island effect and by altering...
In-operation vibration monitoring for complex mechanical structures and rotating machines is of key importance in many industrial areas such as aeronautics (wings and other structures subject to strength), automobile (gearbox mounting with a sports car body), rail transportation, power engineering (rotating machines, core and pipes of nuclear power plants), and civil engineering (large buildings subject to hurricanes or earthquakes, bridges, dams, offshore structures). Tools for the detection and the diagnosis of small changes in vibratory characteristics are particularly useful to set up a preventive maintenance policy based on the actual evolution of the state of the monitored machine or s...
The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Landscape Heritage in the Asia-Pacific revisits the use, growth, and potential of the cultural landscape methodology in the conservation and management of culture-nature heritage in the Asia-Pacific region. Taking both a retrospective and prospective view of the management of cultural heritage in the region, this volume argues that the plurality and complexity of heritage in the region cannot be comprehensively understood and effectively managed without a broader conceptual framework like the cultural landscape approach. The book also demonstrates that such an approach facilitates the development of a flexible strategy for heritage conservation. Acknowledgi...
Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, exhausted by humanity’s consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of nature has become a narrative template quite common among the public environmental discourse and env...
The rising tide of globalization poses a direct threat to the viability of small communities worldwide. Such communities, however, are our greatest hope for sustainable environmental governance, as they possess unparalleled ability to directly manage common-pool resources. Providing a much needed antidote in this age of globalization, this volume advances the idea of collaborative governance as an integration of open and closed commons. Taking into consideration the dimension of conflict resolution, it studies examples of governance structures in various countries around the world to develop a new type of democracy towards multilevel environmental governance that involves the public, private, and commons spheres. With contributions from researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, this volume demonstrates through institutional and empirical analyses the essential role of local commons in providing an axis of resistance to increasing environmental devastation and social inequality towards creating a sustainable future for local communities as well as society at large.