Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage, and fire. Risky Cities is not simply about post-catastrophe profiteering. This book focuses on the way in which disaster capitalism has figured out ways to commodify environmental bads and manage risks. Notably, capitalist city-building results in the physical transformation of nature. This necessitates risk management strategies –such as insurance, environmental assessments, and technocratic mitigation plans. As such capitalists redistribute risk relying on short-term fixes to disaster risk rather than address long-term vulnerabilities.

This open access book draws together key research from the UK Climate Resilience programme. It focuses on topics central to the programme’s research agenda, including improved characterisation and quantification of climate risks, enhanced understanding of the management of climate risks, and the development and delivery of climate services. Key chapters address the challenges inherent to undertaking resilience research, including how to make the term ‘climate resilience’ usable and useful, co-producing research between academics, policy makers and practitioners, and engaging and communicating outside of academia. This book is unique in providing a concise and accessible overview of the programme’s key lessons, placing the findings into a wider context and it will inform future research, policy and practice agendas.

Sustainable development of smart cities infrastructures is of paramount importance and need to be planned, designed, constructed, operated and de-commissioned in a manner that ensures economic, social, environmental and institutional sustainability over the entire infrastructure life cycle. Smart cities infrastructure however be cost effective, disaster resilient, environmentally friendly, conserving natural resources, and sustainable ensuring faster delivery of quality and durable structures which include roads, building, bridges, energy and water infrastructures. Government of India is going to encourage Public Private Partnership (PPP) as an alternate option to build most of the infrastructures, which can be useful both for green-field as well as brown-field smart cities projects. The present book is a collection of contributed research and review papers presented at the ‘National Conference on Sustainable Development of Smart Cities Infrastructure’ (SDSCI-2023) held at National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra in May 2023.The subject matter is grouped into nine sessions which include research articles pertaining to sustainable development of smart cities, urban and rural planning, transportation, built environment and management, sustainable and smart technologies, materials, construction and maintenance, advance modelling, characterization of structures, energy and environment, performance of smart cities infrastructure under extreme loading conditions, green buildings, structural health monitoring, and ICT in smart cities, data mining and machine learning for sustainable infrastructure, GIS and remote sensing, future trends and prospects of smart cities, innovative technologies, building energy and efficiency and sobriety, and sustainable resilience to natural and man-made disasters, and smart materials, etc. The book would be a valuable reference for researchers, students, structural designers, site engineers, and all related engineers involved in the field of sustainable development of smart cities infrastructure.

Despite the best hopes of the past half century, black urban pathologies persist in America. The inner cities remain concentrations of the uneducated, unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable. Many fail to stay in school and others choose lives of drugs, violence, and crime. Most do not marry, leading to single-parent households and children without a father figure. The cycle repeats itself generation after generation. It is easy to argue that nothing works, given the policy failures of the past. For Lewis D. Solomon, fatalism is not acceptable. A complex and interrelated web of issues plague inner-city black males: joblessness; the failure of public education; crime, mass incarceration, and drugs; the collapse of married, two-parent families; and negative cultural messages. Rather than abandon the black urban underclass, Solomon presents strategies and programs to rebuild lives and revitalize America's inner cities. These approaches are neither government oriented nor dependent on federal intervention, and they are not futuristic. Focusing on rehabilitative efforts, Solomon describes workforce development, prisoner reentry, and the role of nonprofit organizations. Solomon's strategies focus on the need to improve the quality of America's workforce through building human capital at the socioeconomic bottom. The goal is to enable more people to fend for themselves, thereby weaning them from dependency on public sector handouts. Solomon shows a path forward for inner-city black males.

Large and persistent inequalities in regional economic performance within countries exist throughout the OECD. The 2019 Regional Outlook discusses the underlying causes of economic disparities across regions and highlights the need for place-based policies to address them. The report makes the ...

What can justice and sustainability mean, pragmatically speaking, in today’s cities? Can justice be the basis on which the practices of city building rely? Can this recognition constitute sustainability in city building, from a pragmatic perspective? Today, we are faced with a mountain of reasons to lose hope in any prospect of moving closer to justice and sustainability from our present position in civilization. Pragmatic Justifications for the Sustainable City: Acting in the Common Place offers a critical and philosophical approach to revaluating the way in which we think and talk about the "sustainable city" to ensure that we neither lose the thread of our urban history, nor the means to live well amidst diversity of all kinds. By building and rebuilding better habits of urban thinking, this book promotes the reconstruction of moral thinking, paving the way for a new urban sustainability model of justice. Utilizing multidisciplinary case studies and building upon anti-foundationalist principles, this book offers a pragmatic interpretation of sustainable development concepts within our emerging global urban context and will be a valuable resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics and professionals in the areas of urban and planning policy, sociology, and urban and environmental geography.

Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic and culinary story of milk and all things dairy – with recipes throughout While mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago. Today, milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurisation. Profoundly intertwined with human civilisation, milk has a compelling and surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.

Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets presents a collection of works from social scientists that offer insights into mortgage markets and the causes, effects, and aftermath of the recent 'subprime' mortgage crisis. Provides an even-handed and detailed analysis of mortgage markets and the recent housing crisis Features contributions from various social scientists with expertise in critical social theories who have assembled and analyzed detailed empirical information Offers a unique and powerful rebuttal to many of the misleading popular explanations of the crisis and its aftermath Reveals how racial minorities and the neighbourhoods inhabited by them are more likely to be targeted by subprime and predatory lenders

This book sets the innovative research contributions, works, and solutions for almost all the intelligent and smart applications in the smart cities. The smart city concept is a relevant topic for industrials, governments, and citizens. Due to this, the smart city, considered as a multi-domain context, attracts tremendously academics researchers and practitioners who provide efforts in theoretical proofs, approaches, architectures, and in applied researches. The importance of smart cities comes essentially from the significant growth of populations in the near future which conducts to a real need of smart applications that can support this evolution in the future cities. The main scope of this book covers new and original ideas for the next generations of cities using the new technologies. The book involves the application of the data science and AI, IoT technologies and architectures, smart earth and water management, smart education and E-learning systems, smart modeling systems, smart mobility, and renewable energy. It also reports recent research works on big data technologies, image processing and recognition systems, and smart security and privacy.