The Hidden Wealth of Cities


Book Description

In every city, the urban spaces that form the public realm—ranging from city streets, neighborhood squares, and parks to public facilities such as libraries and markets—account for about one-third of the city’s total land area, on average. Despite this significance, the potential for these public-space assets—typically owned and managed by local governments—to transform urban life and city functioning is often overlooked for many reasons: other pressing city priorities arising from rapid urbanization, poor urban planning, and financial constraints. The resulting degradation of public spaces into congested, vehicle-centric, and polluted places often becomes a liability, creating a downward spiral that leads to a continuous drain on public resources and exacerbating various city problems. In contrast, the cities that invest in the creation of human-centered, environmentally sustainable, economically vibrant, and socially inclusive places—in partnership with government entities, communities, and other private stakeholders—perform better. They implement smart and sustainable strategies across their public space asset life cycles to yield returns on investment far exceeding monetary costs, ultimately enhancing city livability, resilience, and competitiveness. The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces discusses the complexities that surround the creation and management of successful public spaces and draws on the analyses and experiences from city case studies from around the globe. This book identifies—through the lens of asset management—a rich palette of creative and innovative strategies that every city can undertake to plan, finance, and manage both government-owned and privately owned public spaces.




The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program


Book Description

The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement (CMAQ) program was enacted as part of the surface transportation legislation. This work recommends that Congress retain the sole federal surface transportation program that funds projects to reduce pollution and traffic congestion in areas that must comply with national air quality standards.




Construction Project Management


Book Description

Construction Project Management: An Integrated Approach is a management approach to leading projects and the effective choice and use of project management tools and techniques. It seeks to push the boundaries of project management to take on board future needs and user issues. Integration of the construction project, meaning closer relations between the project team, the supply chain and the client, is long overdue; however, despite some signs of growth in this area, the industry nonetheless remains fragmented in its approach. The role of the project manager is to integrate diverse interests and unify objectives to achieve a common goal. This has now broadened to include a responsibility, on the parts of both client and team, to ensure that construction addresses current and future societal needs. From an economic perspective, a great deal of waste is connected with conflict, thus a holistic approach that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the task at hand will inject energy into project management. This third edition now takes on board the impact of technology in building information modelling and other digitised technologies such as artificial intelligence. Together, they open up avenues for more direct and incisive action to test creative design, manufacture directly and communicate spontaneously and intuitively. In time, such technologies will change the role of project managers but will never take away their responsibility to be passionate about construction and to integrate the team. A new chapter has been added that considers future societal needs. This edition is also reordered to make the project life cycle and process chapters clearer. This book combines best practice in construction with the theories underpinning project management and presents a wealth of practical case studies – many new. It focuses on all construction disciplines that may manage projects. The book is of unique value to students in the later years of undergraduate courses and those on specialist postgraduate courses in project management and also for practitioners in all disciplines and clients who have experienced the frustration caused by the fragmentation of construction projects.













Social Systems Engineering


Book Description

Uniquely reflects an engineering view to social systems in a wide variety of contexts of application Social Systems Engineering: The Design of Complexity brings together a wide variety of application approaches to social systems from an engineering viewpoint. The book defines a social system as any complex system formed by human beings. Focus is given to the importance of systems intervention design for specific and singular settings, the possibilities of engineering thinking and methods, the use of computational models in particular contexts, and the development of portfolios of solutions. Furthermore, this book considers both technical, human and social perspectives, which are crucial to solving complex problems. Social Systems Engineering: The Design of Complexity provides modelling examples to explore the design aspect of social systems. Various applications are explored in a variety of areas, such as urban systems, health care systems, socio-economic systems, and environmental systems. It covers important topics such as organizational design, modelling and intervention in socio-economic systems, participatory and/or community-based modelling, application of systems engineering tools to social problems, applications of computational behavioral modeling, computational modelling and management of complexity, and more. Highlights an engineering view to social systems (as opposed to a “scientific” view) that stresses the importance of systems intervention design for specific and singular settings Divulges works where the design, re-design, and transformation of social systems constitute the main aim, and where joint considerations of both technical and social perspectives are deemed important in solving social problems Features an array of applied cases that illustrate the application of social systems engineering in different domains Social Systems Engineering: The Design of Complexity is an excellent text for academics and graduate students in engineering and social science—specifically, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and management scientists with an interest in finding systematic ways to intervene and improve social systems.




Smart Cities


Book Description