The quality of life of millions of people living in cities could be improved if the form of the city were to evolve in a manner appropriate to its climatic context. Climatically responsive urban design is vital to any notion of sustainability: it enables individual buildings to make use of renewable energy sources for passive heating and cooling, it enhances pedestrian comfort and activity in outdoor spaces, and it may even encourage city dwellers to... more...

This volume covers the topic of innovation in three sections, first demonstrating that processes of innovation and technological change are spatially differentiated, second examining the increasing importance of knowledge creation and diffusion, and third raising key issues related to the systems of innovation approach as a conceptual framwork for regional innovation analysis. Includes enlightening conceptual and empirical work on the issue of how... more...

This book, which resulted from an intensive discourse between experts from several disciplines – complexity theorists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, urban planners and urban designers, as well as a zoologist and a physiologist – addresses various issues regarding cities. It is a first step in responding to the challenge of generating just such a discourse, based on a dilemma identified in the CTC (Complexity Theories of Cities) domain. The... more...

Development Macroeconomics in Latin America and Mexico brings the attention of academics, practitioners, and policy makers to the neglected macroeconomic factors that can account for both the unsatisfactory average growth performance of Latin American and the diversity around this average.

This volume emphasises the sociological view that cities are primarily about people, not places or buildings, and explores the social dynamics of urban space in globalising India. Distinguishing between ‘locale’ and ‘milieu’ and the community–cosmopolitanism dialectic in urban areas, it elucidates the thematic for urban sociology today.  The chapters explore the various perspectives and processes in understanding... more...

This book paints an intimate portrait of an overlooked kind of city that neither grows nor declines drastically. In fact, New Bedford, Massachusetts represents an entire category of cities that escape mainstream urban studies’ more customary attention to global cities (New York), booming cities (Atlanta), and shrinking cities (Flint).  New Bedford-style ordinary cities are none of these, they neither grow nor decline drastically,... more...

The Municipal Finance Handbook aims to help local government practitioners, particularly staff of medium and large cities, improve strategic management of municipal finances. The demands for pragmatic knowledge are fueled in part by decentralization and fiscal pressures, as transfer of responsibilities from central to local governments are not often accompanied with an adequate transfer of resources. Practitioners seek ideas and tools to control... more...

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth―luck, immigration, local economic policies, and... more...

This book brings together a range of viewpoints on a number of the burning issues affecting urban sustainability in North America and Europe at the beginning of the 21st century. H.S. Geyer and his contributors cover a wide spectrum of the urban policy issues that determine the growth and development progress as well as the livability of cities in the Occident. The volume focuses on three broad themes: nuances in urban policy formulation in Britain... more...

This book, a second edition,  includes new data from the 2010 Census of India and NSS reports on consumer expenditure (2011-12), health and education (2014) to examine poverty in China and India, and how it connects with minorities. Poverty has generally become less acute in both China and India, thanks to an impressively rapid growth especially between 2010 and 2015 when the rest of the world including the US and the EU slowed... more...