The New Urban Crisis

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In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. Our winner-take-all cities are just one manifestation of a profound crisis in today's urbanized knowledge economy.

A bracingly original work of research and analysis, The New Urban Crisis offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring growth and prosperity for all.

Enriching Urban Spaces With Ambient Computing, The Internet Of Things, And Smart City Design

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In recent years, the presence of ubiquitous computing has increasingly integrated into the lives of people in modern society. As these technologies become more pervasive, new opportunities open for making citizens'environments more comfortable, convenient, and efficient.

Enriching Urban Spaces with Ambient Computing, the Internet of Things, and Smart City Design is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the interaction between people and computing systems in contemporary society, showcasing how ubiquitous computing influences and shapes urban environments. Highlighting the impacts of these emerging technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, academicians, and practitioners interested in the influential state of pervasive computing within urban contexts.

Headspace: The Psychology Of City Living

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Dr Paul Keedwell uncovers the secret psychology of the city and how it affects our daily happiness.

More and more of us are choosing to live in the man-made environment of the city. The mismatch between this artificial world and our nature-starved souls can contribute to the stresses of city living in a way that is barely noticed – but is crucially important.

What does the science of architectural psychology tell us about how the world of brick and concrete affects how we think, feel and behave?

In an increasingly crowded urban world, how does good urban design inspire, restore and bring us together?

Conversely, how does bad architecture cause anxiety, alienation and depression?

Starting with the home and reaching out to the street, neighbourhood and wider city landscape, Headspace teaches us how to see our cities differently, and how we can best adapt to our rapidly changing urban world.

Landscape As Infrastructure : A Base Primer

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As ecology becomes the new engineering, the projection of landscape as infrastructure—the contemporary alignment of the disciplines of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and urban planning— has become pressing. Predominant challenges facing urban regions and territories today—including shifting climates, material flows, and population mobilities, are addressed and strategized here. Responding to the under-performance of master planning and over-exertion of technological systems at the end of twentieth century, this book argues for the strategic design of 'infrastructural ecologies,' describing a synthetic landscape of living, biophysical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape and direct the future of urban economies and cultures into the 21st century.

Urban Expansion, Land Cover And Soil Ecosystem Services

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by Ciro Gardi (Editor)

More than half of the world population now lives in cities, and urban expansion continues as rural people move to cities. This results in the loss of land for other purposes, particularly soil for agriculture and drainage. This book presents a review of current knowledge of the extension and projected expansion of urban areas at a global scale.

Focusing on the impact of the process of 'land take' on soil resources and the ecosystem services that they provide, it describes approaches and methodologies for detecting and measuring urban areas, based mainly on remote sensing, together with a review of models and projected data on urban expansion. The most innovative aspect includes an analysis of the drivers and especially the impacts of soil sealing and land take on ecosystem services, including agriculture and food security, biodiversity, hydrology, climate and landscape.

Case studies of cities from Europe, China and Latin America are included. The aim is not only to present and analyse this important environmental challenge, but also to propose and discuss solutions for the limitation, mitigation and compensation of this process.

About the Author

Ciro Gardi works in the Animal and Plant Health Unit of the European Food Safety Authority, Parma, Italy. Previously, he was a Senior Scientist at the Land Resource Management Unit of the Joint Research Center of the European Commission and Professor of Soil Science at the University of Parma. He has served as an independent expert and consultant for the European Commission, World Bank, OECD and several NGOs and is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, representing it in the Global Soil Partnership (FAO).