Re-interpreting the Relationship Between Water and Urban Planning


Book Description

Africa is one of the most dynamic continents. It will play a key role in the coming decades in relation to the growth of cities, and environmental conditions will be of primary importance. The structural lack of water and sanitation infrastructure affects the development of Africa's growing urban environments. This book questions the relation between the wide-ranging fields of water and the urban discipline in the Sub-Saharan African context. In particular, it focuses on Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), a city where rapid urbanisation and high annual growth have led to increasing water demand and strained the water and sanitation systems. It examines the spaces water produces, the actors promoting various choices and solutions, the impact of different applied technologies, and the diverse sanitary conditions, focusing on their significance in the shape of the built environment and the urban planning practices and theory. As water occupies and creates spaces, this work tries to establish a relation among the spaces and the structure of the city itself, using infrastructure in the shape of networks that cross the city and on-site systems such as boreholes and latrines, to be considered a hybrid and potentially resilient system.




Re-interpreting the Relationship Between Water and Urban Planning


Book Description

This book focuses on Dar es Salaam, a city where rapid urbanisation and high annual growth have led to increasing water demand and strained the water and sanitation systems.




Reinterpreting Sub-Saharan Cities through the Concept of Adaptive Capacity


Book Description

This book explores whether and how a reinterpretation of Sub-Saharan cities, through the concept of adaptive capacity, could bridge this distance and contribute to a new understanding of the contemporary city. The research contributes to improved knowledge of urban and environmental planning and of the dynamics of development and environmental management in peri-urban areas of Dar es Salaam. This knowledge highlights the limits of certain common generalizations on the character of peri-urban areas. Moreover, the research provides methodological contribution derived from considerations on the strengths and weakness of tools and methods for investigating adaptive capacity and for environmental management, in the city of Dar es Salaam. Finally, it highlights controversial issues and possible research paths related to the relationship between adaptive capacity and urban and environmental planning.







Interpreting China's Development


Book Description

In Interpreting China's Development, leading experts on China provide an overview of this growing superpower, highlighting key issues in the country's political, economic and social development.Underpinned by up-to-date scholarly research yet written in a readable and concise style, this volume of over 40 short chapters offers a very accessible way to understanding the major events and dominant issues that had emerged in China over the last few decades. The essays are grouped under four thematic sections — challenges of governance, growth and structural changes, coping with rising social problems and relations with major powers and neighbours — covering salient topics such as the emerging mode of leadership succession, sustainability of China's high growth, widening inequalities, environmental crisis and the external impact of China's rise.Non-specialists in particular, should find this volume useful in keeping up with China's fast changing developments.




Peri-urban Landscape


Book Description

This book underlines the importance of establishing, in the planning and urban policies oriented towards sustainability, a relationship between the urban expansion – observed in its different forms and dynamics – and the ability of soil and landscape to support agricultural productivity and interface processes. This is the development of a specific investigation theme linked to the problem of soil degradation and peri-urban lands allows a valuable re-interpretation in the field of landscape studies. This book queries the value of the "rural" around a city, in a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing land transformations, good practices, and urban planning trends. Land transformations are at the center of analysis and discussions on the management, planning, and design of the landscape everywhere. This topic is particularly appropriate for European landscapes where land changes are often associated with the degradation of rural and natural areas. This issue represents a crucial point within the framework of the ecological transition towards a truly sustainable society and economy, as established by the European Union. This book is the result of detailed bibliographic research, of in-depth historical research on the most recent challenges and topics of greatest interest in the field of urban studies. Original landscape transformations analyses were performed, introducing also some practical cases, considered relevant contributions in spatial planning.







The Ottoman House


Book Description

Seemingly contradictory ideas of privacy and community dominate Ottoman cities. While houses are internally divided to guard female modesty behind a frontage studded with peep-holes, streets in cities like Amasya are often bridged by first-floor passageways between different houses. This book contains 17 papers by architects and archaeologists looking at how the Ottoman house was structured, how it has varied over time and space, and how surviving examples are faring in a world of breeze-block construction. Although the examples discussed are all Near Eastern, and mostly from Turkey, the revelations this book contains about structuring principles will make it a valuable companion to understanding architectural relics from all over the Ottoman Empire.




Rethinking, Reinterpreting and Restructuring Composite Cities


Book Description

Developments in science and technology, demand-driven education and practices, climate change, the gradual decrease in natural resources, and economic constraints all combine to drive increased interest in research in architecture and urbanism at EU levels. In light of this, the EURAU conferences were initiated in 2004 to create a platform for researchers to share their own research outputs and knowledge, and to discuss problems emerging in architecture and urbanism with a view to develop solutions. This book brings together 19 selected papers delivered at the EURAU2014 Istanbul “Composite Cities” Conference, the primary aim of which was to provide a medium in which the complex relationships between urban form and urban experience could be discussed. The conference did this by examining four composite characters of today’s cities: the hybrid city, the morphed city, the fragmented city and the mutated city. The volume addresses the importance of research on the complexity of today’s cities, cities that are transforming on various levels from local to global, while also shedding light on new models of urbanism discussed together with new decision-making actors.




Revisiting Integrated Water Resources Management


Book Description

The book includes seventeen excellent researched and documented papers that reflect the diversity of thought, ideas and experiences related to IWRM. They draw from an extensive, inclusive and geographically representative range of theoretical propositions and practical examples. These include the implementation status of the IWRM concept at local, basin, regional and national levels; its appropriateness for the twenty-first century; main implementation gaps from the institutional, legal, policy, governance, management and technical viewpoints; the likelihood that IWRM’s entrenchment in laws, regulations and policies has led to smoother implementation and the reasons why that has been the case; reflexions on whether the attention given to IWRM is pushing other alternatives to the policy periphery; and the new conceptual constructions that can be put forward for discussion in the international arena. For the development and water communities it is imperative to debate and reach towards more illustrative conclusions regarding whether the promotion of the IWRM concept and its actual implementation status have been beneficial for development and how the notion could evolve to achieve this end. In-depth objective and constructive discussions, arguments, proposals and ideas are put forward for analysis by all interested parties. The book has the objective of fostering scholarly exchange, encouraging intellectual debate and promoting the advancement of knowledge and understanding of IWRM as a concept, as a goal per se and as a strategy towards development goals. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.