Bücher der Reihe The Urban Book Series

The book provides insights into urban infrastructure debates and discourses in Zimbabwe. Through an inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach, the book explores the theoretical, conceptual and lived experiences in urban infrastructure. The book focuses on case studies relating to urban transport, public housing, water and sanitation and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) among other substantive issues relating to urban infrastructure and services.

The book provides a critical analysis of the geographies of everyday life, looking at how spatial practices craft w(r)iggle room to cope with the boundaries saturated by normativity, power relations, and inequalities. It explores the possibilities for making do with the everyday practices forming a way of living in cramped spaces. In this respect, early-career researchers and activists share their fieldwork experiences through an intersectional lens based on emerging research methodologies and scholar-activist practices. From their own vantage point, they look at their own contexts, practices, and research subjects at the level of everyday life.Spatial practices and place-based imaginaries from France, Finland, and Spain to Turkey and South Africa present a wide range of non-counter hegemonic yet enabling practices for transformation in everyday life. The contributors, trained in a variety of convergent disciplines concerned with everyday life and space (geography, geopolitics, architecture, urban planning, sociology, political sciences), discuss scholar-activist methodologies during the current crisis in contemporary academia, reflect on their research methodologies and research experiences, and inquire into the ways of embodied negotiations for agency, survival, and care.A group of early-career researchers and activists came together to seek out the possibilities of transformative change in everyday life during the peak periods of COVID-19. When researchers and activists were forced to stay at home in isolation, the authors met up online to discuss their subjectivities self-reflexively to challenge the distance between the researcher and ¿the field.¿ The book is the outcome of their collective production based on numerous meetings, writing workshops, and creative debates.

This book introduces a ten-year-long design research project in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China, based on international cooperation studios, design workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Netherlands. This research adapts the existing methods of Landscape Character Assessment (UK), Historic Cultural Landscape Elements (Germany), and Dutch Polder Typology to mapping, describing, and classifying landscape character areas and types at the three scales of regional, municipal, and local. Furthermore, to connect research with design, we developed a typological approach of generating specific measures for the networked polder landscape. This research bridges the gap of a missing landscape characterization method for the conservation, transformation, and critical reconstruction of historic cultural landscapes in a metropolitan context. The book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners interested in the topics of cultural landscape in transition, methods for landscape characterization and typology, and a research-by-design approach in interdisciplinary projects of landscape architecture, urbanism, and regional planning.

This book intends to focus exclusively on anamorphic experiments in contemporary art and design, leaving an in-depth historical examination of its Baroque season to other studies. Themes, languages and fields of application of anamorphosis in contemporary culture are critically analyzed to make the reader aware of the communicative potentiality of this kind of geometrical technique. The book also has the aim to teach the reader the most appropriate geometric techniques for each of them, in order to achieve the designed illusion. Each typology of anamorphosis is accompanied in this book by contemporary installations, a geometrical explanation by means of 3D models and didactic experiments carried on in collaboration with the students of the Department of Architecture in Naples.

The book considers the underground development of cities from a systemic point of view. The authors' scientific methodology for planning a system of alternative design configurations in a metropolis (including underground infrastructure) on the basis of applied system analysis methods is revealed. The book presents a short guide and a number of practical applications of morphological analysis, cognitive modeling, and other system analysis methods as tools for solving various urban problems, including risk assessment in the transport infrastructure of a city; evaluation and justification of constructing different types of underground objects on a selected site according to its structural, functional and geological factors; construction of scenarios aimed at informed decision-making in planning complex underground facilities. The book provides novel and convenient tools for urban development to professionals in urban planning, municipal authorities and investors, and researchers in urban studies.

This book explains the variation and determinants of residential quality and housing preferences in urban private housing markets. It describes the residential characteristics and housing preference dynamics of Lagos urban residents who are majorly sheltered in the city¿s private housing markets. Lagos Metropolitan Area (LMA) is a wide region with differentiated informal housing markets. The city private housing markets vary in quantity, quality, and prices which conjointly influence residents housing preferences and choices. Based on positivist philosophical stance, this book addresses the peculiarities of each residential market in Low Residential Density (LRD), Medium Residential Density (MRD), and High Residential Density (HRD) areas in terms of residential quality and housing preferences. With heuristic methods including predictive model and conjoint choice experimentation, this book unravels the level and variability of residential quality (neighborhood and structural) and housing preference (revealed and stated) decisions in Metropolitan Lagos. In addition, the residential quality and housing preferences are mapped to give their spatial patterns across Lagos megacity neighborhoods as segmented residential submarkets. Applying the positivist philosophical stance, the book provides evidence to support residential quality and housing preference variability across the city private housing submarkets. The book is both a guide and reference for students in the built environment, urban planners, urban policy decision makers, housing researchers, property managers, and real estate professionals who are interested in understanding the residential quality and preference dynamics within polarized cities.

This book studies the principles of urban spatial organization of historic cities. Considering the comparative aspects of study, the reader will notice that despite cultural differences, there is a common understanding in artistic creativity and sensibility in the presented examples.

This book comprehensively examines post-1989 changes to the symbolic landscape of Berlin - specifically, street names, architecture, urban planning and monuments - and links these changes to concepts of contested cultural memory and national identity in Berlin and Germany in the post-Wall period.