The manner in which global trends affect cities and increase instability is like letting a rising river loose on a house. Global trends create urban flotsam that forms a second skin of the earth. How is this visible and how can it be useful in urban planning? This book answers questions through examples. It contains a manifesto for a general debate of issues, a poetic setting of the theme of the second skin and case studies undertaken in urban situations. With splendid photographs and magnificent conceptual maps and diagrams, the book balances between urban theory, urban pedagogy and urban poetry.

Harold Lasswell is one of America's most distinguished political scientists, a man whose work has had enormous impact both in the United States and abroad upon not only his own field but also those of sociology, psychology and psychiatry, economics, law, anthropology, and communications. This collection of essays is the first full-scale effort to deal with the voluminous writings of Lasswell and explore his at once charming and baffling personality which is perhaps inseparable from the inventiveness, unconventionality, and unusual scope of his work. The authors of these essays, many of whom are former students or collaborators, view their subject from a variety of perspectives. What emerges is a full assessment of Lasswell's many-faceted contribution to the social scholarship of his time.

Contemporary society is marked and defined by the ways in which mobile goods, bodies, vehicles, objects, and data are organized, moved and staged. Against the background of the ‘mobilities turn’ this book articulates a new and emerging research field, namely that of ‘mobilities design’. The book revolves around the following research question: How are design decisions and interventions staging mobilities? It builds upon the ‘Staging Mobilities’ model (Jensen 2013) in an exploratory inquiry into the problems and potentials of the design of mobilities. The exchange value between mobilities and design research is twofold. To mobilities research this means getting closer to the ‘material’, and to engage in the creative, exploratory and experimental approaches of the design world which offer new potential for innovative research. Design research, on the other hand, might enter into a fruitful relationship with mobilities research, offering a relational and mobile design thinking and a valuable basis for design reflections around the ubiquitous structures, spaces and systems of mobilities.

Traditional approaches to understand space tend to view public space mainly as a shell or container, focussing on its morphological structures and functional uses. That way, its ever-changing meanings, contested or challenged uses have been largely ignored, as well as the contextual and on-going dynamics between social actors, their cultures, and struggles. The key role of space in enabling spatial opportunities for social action, the fluidity of its social meaning and the changing degree of "publicness" of a space remain unexplored fields of academic inquiry and professional practice. Public Space and Relational Perspectives offers a different understanding of public spaces in the city. The aim of the book is to (re)introduce the lived experiences in public life into the teaching curricula of those academic disciplines which deal with public space and the built environment, such as architecture, planning and urban design, as well as the social sciences. The book presents conceptual, practical and research challenges and brings together findings from activists, practitioners and theorists. The editors provide eight educational challenges that educators can endorse when training future practitioners and researchers to accept and to engage with the social relations that unfold in and through public space. Cover image: KARO*

Under Pressure is about instigation and design in urban housing. Urban housing is a bellwether for economic, social, and political change. It varies widely in quality, typology, and audience and lies between the formal systems of urban infrastructure and the informal systems of daily life. Housing’s complexity offers unique and exciting opportunities to architects. Its entwinement with private equity and public agencies presents important challenges amplified by urbanization. This book gathers and contextualizes relevant conversations in urban housing unfolding today across architecture through four topics: Learning from History, Changing Domesticities, Housing Finance and Policy, and Design and Material Innovation. The result is a multi-disciplinary amalgam of research and design intelligence from thought leaders in the fields of architecture, real estate, economics, policy, material design, and finance.

"Using direct observations of the surrounding landscape and the tangibel artifacts of the city, its topography, streets, temples and other stunning architectural monuments, Barry Bell carries out a progressive investigation into Bangkok's urban sensibility and its central mythologies - the more mysterious perceptual realms of allusion and illusion, arguably the real Bangkok, implicitly present within its deceptive exterior. In spite of the knowledge that, for many people, order seems alien to the city, the author searches for conceptual coherence. He strives to link the city's hectic urban sensibility to its more elusive and hidden character - the dream of Bangkok that is prompted by angelic allusions"--P. [2] of cover.

On a rainy day in May 2007, the mayor of Paris inaugurated the Jardins d’Éole, a park whose completion was hailed internationally as an exemplar of sustainable urbanism. The park was the result of a hard-fought, decadelong protest movement in a low-income Maghrebi and African immigrant district starved for infrastructure, but the Mayor’s vision of urban sustainability was met with jeers. Drawing extensively from immersive, firsthand ethnographic research with northeast Paris residents, as well as an analysis of green architecture and urban design, Andrew Newman argues that environmental politics must be separated from the construct of urban sustainability, which has been appropriated by forces of redevelopment and gentrification in Paris and beyond. France’s turbulent political environment also provides Newman with powerful new insights into the ways in which multiethnic coalitions can emerge⎯even amid overt racism and Islamophobia⎯in the struggle for more just cities and more inclusive societies. A tale of multidimensional political efforts, Landscape of Discontent cuts through the rhetoric of green cities to reveal the promise that environmentalism holds for urban communities anywhere.

While gaming has become an increasingly popular leisure activity in society, the success of the videogame market has also contributed to the application of serious games in many different contexts and most importantly for learning purposes. This technological novelty is the basis for an innovative change in myriad environments such as education, commerce, marketing, healthcare, and many more. It is of great import to understand these applications in order to improve organizational development. The Handbook of Research on Promoting Economic and Social Development Through Serious Games provides reflection on the multidisciplinary applications of serious games. This book contextualizes the importance of serious games in organizational and societal improvement. Covering topics such as cultural heritage, mental health, and tourism, this book is a dynamic resource for policymakers, academicians, interdisciplinary researchers, graduate and post-graduate students, technology developers, faculty of K-12 and higher education, and government officials.

Research in the creative fields of architecture, design, music and the arts has experienced dynamic development for over two decades. The research in these practice- and arts-based fields has become increasingly mature but has also led to various discussions on what constitutes doctoral proficiency in these fields. The term ‘doctorateness’ is often used when referring to the assessment of the production of doctoral research and the research competence of research students, but in architecture and the arts, the concept of doctorateness has not yet attained a clearly articulated definition. The assessment of quality has been practiced by way of supervising, mentoring and the evaluation of dissertations but much less discussed. This book offers perspectives on how to qualify and assess research in architecture, music and the arts. It creates a broader arena for discussion on doctorateness by establishing a framework for its application to creative fields. The book is grouped into three sections and includes contributions from international experts in the various fields working in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The first section offers general frameworks for further conceptualising doctorateness in the fields in question. It is followed by a section that describes and discusses various experiences, concerns and visions on the production and assessment of doctoral research reporting from doctoral programmes in different stages of development. The third section includes future-oriented perspectives on knowledge-building processes, and asks how the ongoing, profound changes in academia could influence the concept of quality in both doctoral process and product. The book presents different perspectives on research assessment practices and developments of relevant criteria in the practice-based and creative fields of architecture and the arts. The contributions propose ways of framing this issue conceptually, show the need for awareness of the specific context and tradition programmes develop and give proposals for various potential trajectories for the future.