Download or read book Urban Evolutionary Biology written by Marta Szulkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Evolutionary Biology fills an important knowledge gap on wild organismal evolution in the urban environment, whilst offering a novel exploration of the fast-growing new field of evolutionary research. The growing rate of urbanization and the maturation of urban study systems worldwide means interest in the urban environment as an agent of evolutionary change is rapidly increasing. We are presently witnessing the emergence of a new field of research in evolutionary biology. Despite its rapid global expansion, the urban environment has until now been a largely neglected study site among evolutionary biologists. With its conspicuously altered ecological dynamics, it stands in stark contrast to the natural environments traditionally used as cornerstones for evolutionary ecology research. Urbanization can offer a great range of new opportunities to test for rapid evolutionary processes as a consequence of human activity, both because of replicate contexts for hypothesis testing, but also because cities are characterized by an array of easily quantifiable environmental axes of variation and thus testable agents of selection. Thanks to a wide possible breadth of inference (in terms of taxa) that may be studied, and a great variety of analytical methods, urban evolution has the potential to stand at a fascinating multi-disciplinary crossroad, enriching the field of evolutionary biology with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes where the urban habitat is key. Urban Evolutionary Biology is an advanced textbook suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers studying the genetics, evolutionary biology, and ecology of urban environments. It is also highly relevant to urban ecologists and urban wildlife practitioners.
Download or read book Barcelona written by Joan Busquets and published by Actar D. This book was released on 2005 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barcelona is regarded as a prototype of a European Mediterranean city with a long urban tradition. It has undergone a specific process of historic formation: density and compactness of urban form, evolution by extension rather than by reform. A history of urban planning necessarily includes a summary of the territorial and urban experience, the physical dimensions of the city that condition its cultural and economic development. This book centers on the construction of Barcelona, taking as its basis the most important planning operations and city projects, and drawing from diverse sources and phases. The local scale of many of the projects contrasts with the cosmopolitan aspirations that have made these interventions so innovative; including major projects for special events, such as the 1888 (World Exhibition), 1929 (Electrical Industries Exhibition) and 1992 (Olympic Games). New prospects are emerging from the recent European institutional framework, particularly changes in the economic system to a post-industrial phase. The urban planning history of Barcelona shows how the city has overcome major contradictions.
Download or read book The Evolution of Urban Form written by Brenda Case Scheer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are so many of our urban environments so resistant to change? The author tackles this question in her comprehensive guide for planners, designers, and students concerned with how cities take shape. This book provides a fundamental understanding of how physical environments are created, changed, and transformed through ordinary processes over time. Most of the built environment adheres to a few physical patterns, or types, that occur over and over. Planners and architects, consciously and unconsciously, refer to building types as they work through urban design problems and regulations. Suitable for professional planners, architects, urban designers, and students, This book includes practical examples of how typology is critical to analytical, design, and regulatory situations.
Download or read book Darwin Comes to Town written by Menno Schilthuizen and published by Picador. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts. *Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete. *Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic. How is this happening? Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.
Download or read book Recycling Spaces written by Emily Waugh and published by Oro Editions. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are constantly evolving: Growing, shrinking, diversifying, sprawling, and densifying. Each phase of evolution brings a unique set of challenges to urban areas for how to remain vital and healthy for long-term sustainability. One of the most important questions facing urban centers today is how to keep people attracted to live in, invest in, and participate in the city. Recycling Spaces focuses on these questions broadly through conversations with experts in the fields of landscape, economics, and urbanism, and specifically through the work of world-renowned landscape architectural office, Martha Schwartz Partners. Martha Schwartz Partners breathes life into cities and neighborhoods by creating spaces that that make people feel emotionally connected, engaged, and invested in the long-term viability of the place. Places that resonate with people are sustainable places. This expanded notion of sustainability, is the basis of the firm's public work, and is illustrated here by a selection of the firms recent and ongoing design projects.
Download or read book Public Places Urban Spaces written by Matthew Carmona and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.
Download or read book Urban Evolution How Cities Influence Natural Selection written by Dr. Subhasis Samanta and published by Dr. Subhasis Samanta. This book was released on with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: a hypothesis about modern evolution
Download or read book City and Country written by Alexander R. Thomas and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years ago—the first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.
Download or read book The Evolution of American Urban Society written by Howard P. Chudacoff and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1975 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eco Evolutionary Dynamics written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of this volume is to discuss Eco-evolutionary Dynamics. - Updates and informs the reader on the latest research findings - Written by leading experts in the field - Highlights areas for future investigation
Download or read book Urban Evolutionary Biology written by Marta Szulkin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities occupy about 3 per cent of the Earth's habitable land area and are home to one out of two humans worldwide; both estimates are predicted to grow. Urban space is thus becoming an important, novel ecological niche for humans and wildlife alike. Building on knowledge gathered by urban ecologists during the last half century, evidence of evolutionary responses to urbanization has rapidly emerged. Urban evolutionary biology is a nascent yet fast-growing field of research--and a fascinating testing ground for evolutionary biologists worldwide. Urbanization offers a great range of opportunities to examine evolutionary processes because of the radically altered and easily quantifiable urban habitat, and the large number of cities worldwide, enabling rigorous, replicated tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Urban populations are increasingly exhibiting both neutral and adaptive evolutionary changes at levels ranging from genotypes to phenotypes. The novelty of urban evolutionary biology is that these changes are driven by the cities we have built, including effects of infrastructure, pollution, and social characteristics of our urban neighbourhoods. It will thereby enrich the field of evolutionary biology with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes where the urban habitat is key. In a series of sixteen chapters written by leading evolutionary biologists working on urban drivers of evolution, Urban Evolutionary Biology is the first academic book in the field. It synthesizes current knowledge on evolutionary processes occurring literally on our doorstep, across the globe, and in each city independently.--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book St Louis written by Eric Sandweiss and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Louis' story stands for the story of all those cities whose ambitions and civic self-image, forged from the growth of the mercantile and industrial eras, have been dramatically altered over time. More dramatically, perhaps, than most but in a manner shared by all St. Louis' changing economic base, shifting population, and altered landscape have forced scholars, policymakers, and residents alike to acknowledge the transiency of what once seemed inexorable metropolitan trends: concentration, growth, accumulated wealth, and generally improved well-being. In this book, Eric Sandweiss scrutinizes the everyday landscape streets, houses, neighborhoods, and public buildings as it evolved in a classic American city.Bringing to life the spaces that most of us pass without noticing, he reveals how the processes of dividing, trading, improving, and dwelling upon land are acts that reflect and shape social relations. From its origins as a French colonial settlement in the eighteenth century to the present day, "St Louis" offers a story not just about how our past is diagramed in brick and asphalt, but also about the American city's continuing viability as a place where the balance of individual rights and collective responsibilities can be debated, demonstrated, and adjusted for generations to come. -- Amazon.com.
Download or read book The City As A Tangled Bank written by Sir Terry Farrell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here Sir Terry Farrell, who has built an international career as an architect-planner, encourages other planners and architects to follow the biologists—look at, learn from, and, indeed, admire the nature of the forces that drive the change, and then with humility and respect work with them to nudge, anticipate and prepare for where it takes us. Searching for patterns within the apparent turbulence and complexity, he analyses the notions of urban design and urban evolution and examines whether or not they need necessarily be seen as opposing one another. The first two chapters discuss emergence as an idea in a biological and architectural context, as well as the distinction between urban design and planning in both education and practice, and the impact of other fields such as landscape design. Seven further chapters examine a range of themes embracing the importance of chain reactions in the progress of urban engineering; the character of habitation; layering; taste and context; adaptation and conversion; the advocacy of the architect-planner; and the effects of digital technology on city evolution. Farrell brings his considerable experience in practice to bear, elucidating his thoughts with examples from cities across the world, including Beijing, Hong Kong, London, New York, and Paris.
Download or read book The Evolution of Great World Cities written by Christopher Kennedy and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some cities seem destined to become major financial capitals, yet never doSeville, for instance, was the centre of Spain's opulent New World Empire, but failed to become a financial metropolis. Others, like former colonial backwater Hong Kong, defy the odds by growing into major trading centres. What are the key factors distinguishing those cities that become wealthy from those that don't? Christopher Kennedy illuminates how geography, technology, and especially the infrastructure of urban economies allow cities to develop and thrive. The Evolution of Great World Cities unfolds through the tales of several urban centresincluding Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York Cityat key junctures in their histories. Kennedy weaves together significant insights from urbanists such as Jane Jacobs and economists such as John Maynard Keynes, drawing striking parallels between the functioning of ecosystems and of wealthy capitals. The Evolution of Great World Cities offers an accessible introduction to urban economies that 'will change the way you think about cities.'
Download or read book Urban Regeneration written by Peter Roberts and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-02-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing students and practitioners with a detailed overview of the key theoretical and applied issues, this book is a comprehensive and integrated primer on regeneration. The various chapters: review the history and context of urban regeneration; consider funding implications; look at environmental, social and community issues, as well as employment, education and training; focus on managing urban regeneration; consider land use issues; and discuss monitoring and evaluation. The book concludes with a comparative analysis, with examples from America and Europe, and a discussion of future trends. The book represents the first systematic overview of urban regeneration in one volume and is set to become the standard referenc
Download or read book Towns in Transition written by Neil Christie and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The studies in this volume are based on new archaeological data and provide a full and convincing reassessment of the old image of urban decay and the impact of incoming 'Barbarians' and Arabs on towns. The broad geographical range of towns studied, and the informed and authoritative interpretations offered in this volume, will be invaluable to scholars seeking to understand this complex, intriguing and misunderstood period of history.
Download or read book Learning Innovation and Urban Evolution written by David F. Batten and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the global information society, innovation is a highly pervasive process that influences all facets of human life: cultural, economic, political, and institutional. A desire to comprehend the impacts of innovative change on so many areas of urban life prompted the research project that has resulted in the publication of this volume. Our research confirms that we are presently in the midst of an era of rapid and explosive change. The primary engine driving this latest transformation of the post-industrial society is generally thought to be technological. But such an explanation is too narrow. Broadly speaking, the age in which we find ourselves could be more aptly described as a global, knowledge-intensive age. Many of today's knowledge-intensive activities, like research and development (R&D) programs, are being conducted with relative ease on a multinational scale. As well as science having an increasing impact on processes of innovation, R&D activities also have become more complex. We can observe a growing sophistication of learning-by-doing among creative economic agents. This more sophisticated era of global knowledge exchange is facilitated by major advances in our infrastructure networks. In this highly interactive world, many innovations are by-products of collective exchanges between cities far apart, simplified by the ease of transport and communication. Thus, there is a need for us to look more closely at various collective sequences of learning, knowledge exchange and innovation in a spatial setting. This is the primary purpose of this book.
