Smart Futures, Challenges of Urbanisation, and Social Sustainability


Book Description

This book tackles the challenges posed by accelerating urbanization, and demystifies Social Sustainability, the least understood of all the different areas of sustainable development. The volume’s twin focus on these profoundly intertwined topics creates a nuanced and vitally important resource. Large migrations from rural areas to cities without appropriate planning and infrastructure improvements, including housing, education and health care optimization, have created significant challenges across the globe. The authors suggest technology-rich strategies to meet these challenges by careful application of data on population growth and movement to the planning, design, and construction of operational infrastructures that can sustainably support our increasingly rapid population growth.




Sustainable Smart Cities in India


Book Description

This book presents fundamental and applied research aimed at the development of smart cities across India. Based on the exploration of an extensive array of multidisciplinary literature, this book discusses critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy, people and communities, economy, infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors are broadly covered under the integrative framework of the book to examine the vision and challenges of smart city initiatives. The book suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals, students, research scholars and policy makers. A lot of work is happening on smart cities as it is an upcoming area of research and development. At international level, and even in India, the concept of smart cities concept is a hot topic at universities, research centers, ministries, transport departments, civic bodies, environment, energy and disaster organizations, town planners and policy makers. This book provides ideas and information to government officials, investors, experts and research students.




Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future


Book Description

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.




Understanding Social Sustainability in a Hill Town


Book Description

Nestled amidst rolling hills, Shillong, the Himalayan capital city of Meghalaya in India’s northeast, faces a growing challenge of water scarcity. This timely book examines the role of urban and traditional village councils (the Khasi dorbar shnong) in shaping equitable water distribution and management through the lens of social sustainability. The book navigates through the complexities of water governance, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities and elucidating the interplay between tradition and modernity in urban governance. It also features narratives of success and struggle, and covers diverse themes, including social capital and gender. It initially foregrounds social sustainability setting the context for the study. It ventures into a detailed examination of the institutions of the village councils, with particular attention to water equity and water governance, including highlighting differences between municipal and non-municipal areas. The volume offers significant theoretical and empirical insights into Shillong's water challenges, filling a gap in the literature on northeast hill towns/cities. Part of Transitions in Northeastern India series, this book will be valuable to a diverse audience including students, researchers, policy practitioners, community leaders, and general readers interested in urban studies, sociology, development studies, public administration, Asian studies, sustainability, and those concerned about our urban-water future.




Social Inequality


Book Description

This edited volume Social Inequality - Structure and Social Processes is a collection of reviewed and relevant research chapters offering a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the field of social sciences and humanities. The book comprises single chapters authored by various researchers and edited by an expert active in the social sciences and humanities research area. All chapters are complete in themselves but united under a common research study topic. This publication aims at providing a thorough overview of the latest research efforts by international authors on social sciences and humanities, and to open new research paths for further developments.




Industry 4.0 and Engineering for a Sustainable Future


Book Description

This unique volume considers the emergence of “Industry 4.0” (i4.0) and the many ways the multifaceted field of Engineering is transforming our ideas and our options around sustainability. It points to emerging technological advances that are facilitating industrial process improvements to artificial intelligence’s promise to help us live “smartly” and manage energy demand. Engineering for a sustainable future is an exploding area of research. This book provides coverage of key case studies from industrial partners such as Ericsson, British Telecom (BT), BMW, Matrixx and research from different UK and international institutions. Examines Smart Engineering Design; Considers how Communication Technologies are developing in the age of i4.0 (from 4G to 6G and beyond); Using interesting case studies from large manufacturers such as BMW to examine Rapid Prototyping and Digital manufacturing; Covers some key issues about Big Data and network security and discusses “Blockchain”; Provides fresh insight into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality; Discusses global warming and discusses how urban heat islands are having a detrimental impact on the health and wellbeing of inhabitants in major cities; Provides interesting case studies to determine the industry 4.0 (I4.0) readiness of eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs).




Digital Technologies, Smart Cities, and the Environment


Book Description

The concept of smart cities holds environmental promises: that digital technologies will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution and waste, and help address climate change. Drawing on academic scholarship and two case studies from Manchester and Helsinki, this timely and accessible book examines what happens when these promises are broken, as they prioritise technological innovation rather than environmental care. The book reveals that smart cities’ vision of sustainable digital future obfuscates the environmental harms and social injustices that digitisation inflicts. The framework of “broken promises”, coined by the authors, centres environmental questions in analysing imaginaries and practices of smart cities. This is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between digital technologies and environment justice.




Ecological Intensification of Natural Resources for Sustainable Agriculture


Book Description

Ecological intensification involves using natural resources such as land, water, soil nutrients, and other biotic and abiotic variables in a sustainable way to achieve high performance and efficiency in agricultural yield with minimal damage to the agroecosystems. With increasing food demand there is high pressure on agricultural systems. The concept of ecological intensification presents the mechanisms of ensuring high agricultural productivity by restoration the soil health and landscape ecosystem services. The approach involves the replacement of anthropogenic inputs with eco-friendly and sustainable alternates. Effective ecological intensification requires an understanding of ecosystems services, ecosystem's components, and flow of resources in the agroecosystems. Also, awareness of land use patterns, socio-economic factors, and needs of the farmer community plays a crucial role. It is therefore essential to understand the interaction of ecosystem constituents within the extensive agricultural landscape. The editors critically examined the status of ecological stress in agroecosystems and address the issue of ecological intensification for natural resources management. Drawing upon research and examples from around the world, the book is offering an up-to-date account, and insight into the approaches that can be put in practice for poly-cropping systems and landscape-scale management to increase the stability of agricultural production systems to achieve ‘Ecological resilience’. It further discusses the role of farmer communities and the importance of their awareness about the issues. This book will be of interest to teachers, researchers, climate change scientists, capacity builders, and policymakers. Also, the book serves as additional reading material for undergraduate and graduate students of agriculture, forestry, ecology, agronomy, soil science, and environmental sciences. National and international agricultural scientists, policymakers will also find this to be a useful read for green future.




Vertical Farming


Book Description

What Is Vertical Farming By 2050, it’s estimated that there will be two billion more human beings than there are today. To feed that many people, we’ll need a landmass the size of South America to account for the food production. Unfortunately for everyone, they don’t make new continents anymore, and if the lack of land isn’t enough to worry about, year by year, the planet is losing arable land due to the changing climate, intensifying weather conditions, air quality, and more. Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers. It often incorporates controlled-environment agriculture, which aims to optimize plant growth, and soilless farming techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aero ponics. Some common choices of structures to house vertical farming systems include buildings, shipping containers, tunnels, and abandoned mine shafts. The main advantage of utilizing vertical farming technologies is the increased crop yield that comes with a smaller unit area of land requirement. The increased ability to cultivate a larger variety of crops at once because crops do not share the same plots of land while growing is another sought-after advantage. Additionally, crops are resistant to weather disruptions because of their placement indoors, meaning fewer crops lost to extreme or unexpected weather occurrences. Because of its limited land usage, vertical farming is less disruptive to the native plants and animals, leading to further conservation of the local flora and fauna. How You Will Benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Vertical Farming Chapter 2: Arcology Chapter 3: Development Supported Agriculture Chapter 4: Folkewall Chapter 5: Foodscaping Chapter 6: Green Wall Chapter 7: Container Garden Chapter 8: Terrace (Earthworks) Chapter 9: Terrace (Garden) Chapter 10: Terrace (Building) Chapter 11: Urban Horticulture (II) Answering the public top questions about vertical farming. (III) Real world examples for the usage of vertical farming in many fields. (IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technology in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of vertical farming' technologies. Who This Book Is For Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of vertical farming.




Urban Social Sustainability


Book Description

This ground breaking volume raises radical critiques and proposes innovative solutions for social sustainability in the built environment. Urban Social Sustainability provides an in-depth insight into the discourse and argues that every urban intervention has a social sustainability dimension that needs to be taken into consideration, and incorporated into a comprehensive and cohesive ‘urban agenda’ that is built on three principles of recognition, integration, and monitoring. This should be achieved through a dialogical and reflexive process of decision-making. To achieve sustainable communities, social sustainability should form the basis of a constructive dialogue and be interlinked with other areas of sustainable development. This book underlines the urgency of approaching social sustainability as an urban agenda and goes on to make suggestions about its formulation. Urban Social Sustainability consists of original contributions from academics and experts within the field and explores the significance of social sustainability from different perspectives. Areas covered include urban policy, transportation and mobility, urban space and architectural form, housing, urban heritage, neighbourhood development, and urban governance. Drawing on case studies from a number of countries and world regions the book presents a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding from social sustainability in urban settings, and provides practitioners and policy makers with innovative recommendations to achieve more socially sustainable urban environment.