The technological developments as well as urban future of an information age where the development of ICT sets the pace and options is explored in this book. The text examines the current state of daily travelling, and highlights the achievable impact and acceptability of transport policy measures. Freight transport is discussed from an industry viewpoint. In addition, the text presents various innovative approaches to rearranging current freight transport networks. Methods to evaluate the societal consensus related to the spatial development - linked to transport infrastructures - are also described. Still further, the text discuses methods for assessing spatial planning policies.

This book supports companies in the transport sector, political decision-makers, transport engineers, planners and scientists doing fundamental research who are confronted by growing challenges in transport. These challenges arise from a number of powerful socio-technical trends, including: digitalisation, globalisation, urbanisation, and the requirements of individual users and the increased need to reduce environmental impact of transport. Providing the innovations required to cope with these challenges is not a simple matter. Towards Innovative Transport Systems structures and compiles theoretical foundations from evolutionary economics, the sociology of technology and innovation research in a way that provides a broad understanding of innovation processes without demanding prior knowledge. Using the Concept of Transport System Evolution (CTSE), it explains in depth the economics of innovation in the transport sector, thus contextualising processes, drivers and obstacles at work in current practice; among such processes are the changeover to electric mobility, the realization of autonomous cars, the revival of railway by innovations and dealing with disruptive innovations in transport. The CTSE is an approach to making concrete the multi-level perspective for the transport sector introduced by Frank Geels. On the basis of the CTSE, the author proposes principles for a novel innovation policy in transport that can serve the reader as a guide when making strategic decisions.

Examining non-technological innovations for environmentally and socially-friendly transport, this book provides the reader with a better understanding of this often overlooked topic. It features four illustrative case studies, and presents a concise review of the core transport modes (road, rail and marine transport). Transport companies are compelled to innovate due to economic and environmental pressures, and the aim of these innovations is to improve fuel efficiency and ultimately to transform energy use in the transport sector. Whilst many of these innovations are technological, they can conversely be non-technological in nature. This book is intended for students and researchers interested in economics, environmental economics and economics of innovation. It also offers a useful resource to industry professionals interested in ecology and transport.

Over the last two centuries, the development of modern transportation has significantly transformed human life. The main theme of this book is to understand the complexity of transportation development and model the process of network growth including its determining factors, which may be topological, morphological, temporal, technological, economic, managerial, social or political. Using multidimensional concepts and methods, the authors develop a holistic framework to represent network growth as an open and complex process with models that demonstrate in a scientific way how numerous independent decisions made by entities such as travelers, property owners, developers, and public jurisdictions could result in a coherent network of facilities on the ground. Models are proposed from innovative perspectives including self-organization, degeneration, and sequential connection to interpret the evolutionary growth of transportation networks in explicit consideration of independent economic and regulatory initiatives. Employing these models, the authors survey a series of topics ranging from network hierarchy and topology to first mover advantage. The authors demonstrate, with a wide spectrum of empirical and theoretical evidence, that network growth follows a path that is not only logical in retrospect, but also predictable and manageable from a planning perspective. In the larger scheme of innovative transportation planning, this book provides a re-consideration of conventional planning practice and sets the stage for further development on the theory and practice of the next-generation, evolutionary planning approach in transportation, making it of interest to scholars and practitioners alike in the field of transportation .

Urban transport systems need to be analyzed from various perspectives: the offer on one hand, the demand on the other hand, but also their negative externalities (risks of transport systems). These three dimensions are rarely apprehended in an integrated perspective. This book provides a large collection of chapters dealing with these specific dimensions, each written by recognized specialists in their domain, and articulates them in an integrated way.

This Handbook is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the explanation of economic growth in the space economy. . . The editors and the individual contributors are to be congratulated on producing such an important collection of review essays which is destined to become one of the definitive reference books on the subject. John McCombie, Scienze Regionali . . . offers a valuable up-to-date overview of many aspects of these important theoretical developments. Peter Wood, Environment & Planning B The book contains a wealth of leading-edge material on regional growth and development issues and provides a good historical review of the dominant mainstream theories. This Handbook will be a valuable asset to any graduate student, researcher, regional planner, or policymaker interested in regional economic issues. Laura Lamb, Review of Regional Studies Regional economics an established discipline for several decades has gone through a rapid pace of change in the past decade and several new perspectives have emerged. At the same time the methodology has shown surprising development. This volume brings together contributions looking at new pathways in regional economics, written by many well-known international scholars. The most advanced theories, measurement methods and policy issues in regional growth are given in-depth treatment. The focus here is to collect cutting-edge theories explaining regional growth and local development. The authors highlight the recent advances in theories, the normative potentialities of these theories and the cross-fertilization of ideas among regional economists and mainstream economists. Theories of regional growth and development need to be able to interpret, more than ever, the way in which regions achieve a role in the international division of labour and, more importantly, the way in which regions can maintain this role over time. Topics covered include: regional growth and development policies and measurement methods; development theories of innovation, knowledge and space, and regional production factors; and growth theories and space. This book will be a source of reference and information for both scholars and students in the area of regional economics.

This book analyzes the social capital of the growing knowledge economy, from both theoretical and empirical points of view. The theoretical section discusses social capital as an economic concept, developing a theory of the social capital of the enterprise. The empirical section compares aspects of the social capital of three different socio-economic systems: the US, Japan and Sweden. The book discusses a number of issues for further research.

The twenty-first century will be the age of global interaction and organized patterns of networks. This important book addresses the strategic dimensions of networks, especially in transportation and information communication technology in Europe. The authors examine the challenges brought about by European unification and accession, through which a coherent and efficient European network system will need to be implemented. The topics addressed include the emergence of new network structures and strategies, the implications of European integration policies for network operations and developments, and the assessment of network synergy effects.

1 2 Daniel Felsenstein and Boris A. Portnov 1 Department of Geography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel 2 Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Haifa, Israel During the Candiot War of 1645-1669, the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim I ordered his chief admiral to attack Malta. Fearing imminent defeat by the superior Venetian forces stationed on the island, the admiral decided to trick the sultan out of the idea. As the story goes, he placed a candle on his naval map, allowing the wax to drip on the tiny island until it was completely covered. Then he exclaimed in false surprise, “Malta Yok!” (There is no Malta!), and convinced the sultan to sail his fleet to the Island of Crete instead. Although Malta is not featured in this volume, most of the countries it covers are of “wax drip” size. Intuitively, it may be expected that everything in small countries is diminutive: distances, population, economies, and even regional inequalities. Thus, at a symposium on “The Challenge of Development” convened in Israel in 1957 to mark the inauguration of a new building for the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the eminent US economist Simon Kuznets stated that “developed small states seem to have succeeded in spreading the fruits of economic growth more widely among their populations than the larger states at comparable levels of income per capita”.

Complex systems analysis has become a fascinating topic in modern research on non-linear dynamics, not only in the physical sciences but also in the life sciences and the social sciences. After the era of bifurcation theory, chaos theory, syn- getics, resilience analysis, network dynamics and evolutionary thinking, currently we observe an increasing interest in critical transitions of dynamic real-world systems in many disciplines, such as demography, biology, psychology, economics, earth sciences, geology, seismology, medical sciences, and so on. The relevance of this approach is clearly re?ected in such phenomena as traf?c congestion, ?nancial crisis, ethnic con?icts, eco-system breakdown, health failures, etc. This has prompted a world-wide interest in complex systems. Geographical space is one of the playgrounds for complex dynamics, as is witnessed by population movements, transport ?ows, retail developments, urban expansion, lowland ?ooding and so forth. All such dynamic phenomena have one feature in common: the low predictability of uncertain interrelated events occurring at different interconnected spatio-temporal scale levels and often originating from different disciplinary backgrounds. The study of the associated non-linear (fast and slow) dynamic transition paths calls for a joint research effort of scientists from different disciplines in order to understand the nature, the roots and the con- quences of unexpected or unpredictable changes in complex spatial systems.