Bücher der Reihe Series in Built Environment

This book is an edited collection of seven chapters on the theme of 'people and space interactions in different settings'. Using a variety of problems, it showcases a rich set of solutions to the global challenges of functional, sustainable and responsive habitats in both urban and rural environments. The book deals with cultural landscapes, sustainable housing settings, the environment and human response, spatial epidemiology, neighbourhood and health, and the subjectivity-objectivity continuum in man-environment research. The studies apply a variety of social research methods and strategies relevant to the study of human interaction with its environment. Collectively they serve as templates for direction in modern social science research methodology built on evidence-based scientific inquiry of the built environment. It can guide both young and seasoned researchers in considering appropriate responses to various social research problems, including assessing various options in research process innovation. A recurrent lesson from the individual studies, and significant contribution of the volume, is that each research endeavor needs to be based on a firm philosophical grounding as this goes a long way in determining the type of data to be collected, and the ways that they are analysed and interpreted. Taking a cross-disciplinary perspective, this edited collection should be of interest to scholars of geography, anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, urban planning, architecture, and above all environment-behaviour studies.

Each day new articles, books, and reports present new methods, standards, and technologies for achieving sustainability in architecture. Additionally, new materials, technological gadgets, and data are increasingly considered the staples of architecture’s future. As we increasingly embrace this techno-advancement, we must be equally aware that we may be pushing architecture into a managerial science and away from its core concerns such as expression, contextuality, functionality and aesthetics. Sustainable architecture that is focused on the abstract measurements of consumption, energy, and emissions loses sight of the vital role that architecture holds in our world: it is the field that creates our public spaces and our places of dwelling, of business, of production, of leisure, and creation. Additionally, it fails to comprehend the human dimension of buildings, as elements that are deeply connected to their sites’ historic contexts and that play a key role in defining our social relations and our connection to the spaces we occupy and utilize. “Sustainable Architecture – Between Measurement and Meaning” takes a step back to reflect on how sustainability in the built environment can be theorized and practiced critically. This book exposes that architecture remains a human and social science that lies at the intersection of measurements and meanings. It reveals that sustainable architecture can still operate in a dialectic space of expression, rather than serving as a manifesto for either the technical or socio-cultural extremes. It purports that the human intuition, senses, and skills still holds the key to unravelling alternative futures of sustainable built spaces. And that most importantly, humans still have a place in sustainable architecture. This book will be of interest to students, early career scholars, established researchers and practitioners studying sustainability in the built environment. It can be used as a referencee to those in the fields of design, architecture, landscape and urban design, urban studies, geography, social sciences, and engineering.

The purpose of the book is to assess the process of urban verticalization in different contexts through time, to provide insight into the relationships between highrise design and the way inhabitants negotiate them in their everyday lives, to assess how planners, politicians, and designers negotiate residential highrises in the strategies they develop for building the city and to introduce urban narratives and cartographies. Verticalization, although not new, currently takes place in a very different context than post-1945. Today, highrise residential buildings are more than architectural solutions: they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. Our exploration of residential verticalization is anchored in case studies, revealing different types of local-global negotiations in the design of the city, and has been framed by three interrelated dynamics: first, the complex relationships within the financialization of real estate markets, revealing differences in the types of local-global negotiations in the construction of the neo-liberal city; secondly, the most developed, anchors residential verticalization in the processes of socio-spatial differentiation within cities (mostly identified as gentrification associated to processes of urban renewal and densification; the third, related to readings and interpretations of the urban landscape and social, spatial practices and its iconographic and cartographic representations. This book is of interest to academics, students, planners, architects, and urban studies professionals. It shows that the chosen research object is an increasingly relevant angle of analysis of the contemporary city. It also provides a better knowledge of the processes of residential verticalization, their impact on the privatization of the urban space, and on urban segregation or fragmentation.