Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development PDF Author: Chaouki Ghenai
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 9535101005
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
The technological advancement of our civilization has created a consumer society expanding faster than the planet's resources allow, with our resource and energy needs rising exponentially in the past century. Securing the future of the human race will require an improved understanding of the environment as well as of technological solutions, mindsets and behaviors in line with modes of development that the ecosphere of our planet can support. Sustainable development offers an approach that would be practical to fuse with the managerial strategies and assessment tools for policy and decision makers at the regional planning level.

Beyond the Networked City

Beyond the Networked City PDF Author: Olivier Coutard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317633695
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ‘break’ with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development PDF Author: Chaouki Ghenai
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 9535101005
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Get Book Here

Book Description
The technological advancement of our civilization has created a consumer society expanding faster than the planet's resources allow, with our resource and energy needs rising exponentially in the past century. Securing the future of the human race will require an improved understanding of the environment as well as of technological solutions, mindsets and behaviors in line with modes of development that the ecosphere of our planet can support. Sustainable development offers an approach that would be practical to fuse with the managerial strategies and assessment tools for policy and decision makers at the regional planning level.

Rethinking Nature

Rethinking Nature PDF Author: Aurélie Choné
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315444747
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Contemporary ideas of nature were largely shaped by schools of thought from Western cultural history and philosophy until the present-day concerns with environmental change and biodiversity conservation. There are many different ways of conceptualising nature in epistemological terms, reflecting the tensions between the polarities of humans as masters or protectors of nature and as part of or outside of nature. The book shows how nature is today the focus of numerous debates, calling for an approach which goes beyond the merely technical or scientific. It adopts a threefold – critical, historical and cross-disciplinary – approach in order to summarise the current state of knowledge. It includes contributions informed by the humanities (especially history, literature and philosophy) and social sciences, concerned with the production and circulation of knowledge about "nature" across disciplines and across national and cultural spaces. The volume also demonstrates the ongoing reconfiguration of subject disciplines, as seen in the recent emergence of new interdisciplinary approaches and the popularity of the prefix "eco-" (e.g. ecocriticism, ecospirituality, ecosophy and ecofeminism, as well as subdivisions of ecology, including urban ecology, industrial ecology and ecosystem services). Each chapter provides a concise overview of its topic which will serve as a helpful introduction to students and a source of easy reference. This text is also valuable reading for researchers interested in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, ecology, politics and all their respective environmentalist strands.

Territorial Ecology and Socio-ecological Transition

Territorial Ecology and Socio-ecological Transition PDF Author: Nicolas Buclet
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119821363
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In the same realm as social ecology, industrial ecology and the circular economy, a new interdisciplinary field is growing: territorial ecology. Based on the analysis of the metabolism of human societies at a local level, it helps us diagnose a socioecosystem. This diagnostic is not only based on what is circulating, but also on how it is organized and why. Who is at the origin of a flow? What are their motivations? Who has the power to make decisions about it? This methodology, taking into account both the material description of human societies and the analysis of decisionmaking processes, might also be relevant for territorial diagnostics. It leads us to a systemic view of the consequences of individual and collective actions on the sustainability of local socio ecosystems. Socio-ecological transition implies a substantial evolution of human societies. Innovation, be it technological, organizational or social, is intrinsically involved in this evolution. However, if transition calls for disruptive rather than incremental innovations, we must also assess these innovations with a systemic view of their consequences.

Cities

Cities PDF Author: Pierre Jacquet
Publisher: The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
ISBN: 8179931315
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The twenty-first century is already an urban one. Cities are pivotal to sustainability concerns globalization, climate change, food security, environmental protection, and innovation.Today's urban actors, both citizens and their leaders, have a major responsibility as trustees of the future: their present actions will influence the shape and structure of cities, so that the generation to come may live healthy and contended lives.This volume takes the reader straight to the heart of how cities work, and identifies contemporary trends, mechanism and tools that can influence current strategies and choices.The authors show that urbanization is not a problem per se for sustainable development, but rather that cities, in all their diversity and complexity, offer solutions as well as challenges.The reader will be inspired by vital analyses of the next decade's windows of opportunity for sustainable urban growth.

Vegetal Politics

Vegetal Politics PDF Author: Lesley Head
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317387228
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human–plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This book aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. This innovative collection explores themes of belonging, practices and places. Together, the chapters suggest new kinds of ‘vegetal politics’, documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The book also raises methodological questions and challenges for future research. This book was published as a special issue of Social and Economic Geography.

Recent Advances in Environmental Science from the Euro-Mediterranean and Surrounding Regions

Recent Advances in Environmental Science from the Euro-Mediterranean and Surrounding Regions PDF Author: Amjad Kallel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319705482
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1761

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Book Description
This volume includes the papers presented during the 1st Euro-Mediterranean Conference for Environmental Integration (EMCEI) which was held in Sousse, Tunisia in November 2017. This conference was jointly organized by the editorial office of the Euro-Mediterranean Journal for Environmental Integration in Sfax, Tunisia and Springer (MENA Publishing Program) in Germany. It aimed to give a more concrete expression to the Euro-Mediterranean integration process by supplementing existing North-South programs and agreements with a new multilateral scientific forum that emphasizes in particular the vulnerability and proactive remediation of the Euro-Mediterranean region from an environmental point of view. This volume gives a general and brief overview on current research focusing on emerging environmental issues and challenges and its applications to a variety of problems in the Euro-Mediterranean zone and surrounding regions. It contains over five hundred and eighty carefully refereed short contributions to the conference. Topics covered include (1) innovative approaches and methods for environmental sustainability, (2) environmental risk assessment, bioremediation, ecotoxicology, and environmental safety, (3) water resources assessment, planning, protection, and management, (4) environmental engineering and management, (5) natural resources: characterization, assessment, management, and valorization, (6) intelligent techniques in renewable energy (biomass, wind, waste, solar), (7) sustainable management of marine environment and coastal areas, (8) remote sensing and GIS for geo-environmental investigations, (9) environmental impacts of geo/natural hazards (earthquakes, landslides, volcanic, and marine hazards), and (10) the environmental health science (natural and social impacts on Human health). Presenting a wide range of topics and new results, this edited volume will appeal to anyone working in the subject area, including researchers and students interested to learn more about new advances in environmental research initiatives in view of the ever growing environmental degradation in the Euro-Mediterranean region, which has turned environmental and resource protection into an increasingly important issue hampering sustainable development and social welfare.

Natura Urbana

Natura Urbana PDF Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262367467
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy’s fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether "urban political ecology," broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences,and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities PDF Author: Olivier Coutard
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800889151
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Infrastructural Times

Infrastructural Times PDF Author: Jean-Paul D. Addie
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 152922974X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.