Download or read book The Earth as Transformed by Human Action written by B. L. Turner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-29 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Earth as Transformed by Human Action is the culmination of a mammoth undertaking involving the examination of the toll our continual strides forward, technical and social, take on our world. The purpose of such a study is to document the changes in the biosphere that have taken place over the last 300 years, to contrast global patterns of change to those appearing on a regional level, and to explain the major human forces that have driven these changes. The first section deals strictly with the major human forces of the past 300 years and the second is a detailed account of the transformations of the global environment wrought by human action. The final section examines a range of perspectives and theories that purport to explain human actions with regard to the biosphere.

Download or read book Mexico Megacity written by James B Pick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes and analyzes a wealth of data about Mexico Citys growth, change, and spatial patterns. Applying modern techniques of geographic information systems and cluster analysis, the authors reveal many previously unknown or unrecognized trends and patterns. The authors provide historical background, analyze key findings and relationships, and tie their results to the literature on Mexico City and other giant cities. The United Nations predicts the emergence of many more giant cities worldwide over the next quarter century, most of which will appear in the developing world. Mexico Megacity may be a milestone from a comparative perspective in increasing knowledge about one developing world megacity and offering analytical tools to study others. With a population of 15 million persons in 1990, Mexico City is one of the worlds largest cities. It is a famous center of civilizations and culture and one of the economic capitals of the Americas, but it also has serious social and economic problems, including large impoverished zones, severe environmental degradation, crime, and overpopulation. This book describes and analyzes growth, change, and spatial patterns in Mexico City, looking at urbanization, population, marriage and fertility, health and mortality, migration, environment and housing, social characteristics, the economy, labor force, and corporate structure. Applying modern techniques of geographic information systems and spatial analysis, the authors reveal many previously unknown or unrecognized trends and patterns. In a capstone chapter, they summarize the spatial patterns in a series of cluster analyses that identify distinctive zones within the metropolisa prosperous core, surrounding complex ring patterns, an impoverished zone, and semi-rural arms. They also compare the pattern of Mexico Citys cluster zones to the classical and developmental literature on cities. In closing, the authors suggest government policies that would foster optimal future development of an even larger metropolis. This book addresses a topic of growing importance. The United Nations predicts the emergence of many more giant cities worldwide over the next quarter century, most of which will appear in the developing world. Mexico Megacity is a milestone work that increases our knowledge about one developing world megacity while offering analytical tools for studying others.

Download or read book Gated Communities written by Samer Bagaeen and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gated Communities" presents a collection of new writings by an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors, which provides a historic, socio-political and contemporary cultural perspective of gated communities.

Download or read book Metropolitan Governance in Latin America written by Alejandra Trejo Nieto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a powerful analysis of the challenges of metropolitan governance in all its messiness and complexity. It examines Latin American metropolitan governance by focusing on the issue of public service provision and comparatively examining five of the largest and most complex urban agglomerations in the region: Buenos Aires, Bogota, Lima, Mexico City and Santiago. The volume identifies and discusses the most pressing challenges associated with metropolitan coordination and the coverage, quality and financial sustainability of service delivery. It also reveals a number of spatial inequalities associated with inadequate provision, which may perpetuate poverty and other inequalities. Metropolitan Governance in Latin America will be valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers tackling themes of urban planning, spatial inequality, public service provision and Latin American urban development.

Download or read book Proceedings RMRS written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Monstrous Politics written by Ben Gerlofs and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities. Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state. A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

Download or read book Market Reforms in Mexico written by Mark Eric Williams and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking Mexico as an example, Williams (political science, Middlebury College) considers the various successes and failures of market-based reforms in areas like privatization, deregulation, and environmental policy. He assesses policy initiatives under various administrations and compares Mexico's privatization efforts to those of Argentina. Three case studies are presented and the findings analyzed in a comparative framework. The role of coalitions in successful reforms is emphasized. c. Book News Inc.

Download or read book Hotel Mexico written by George F. Flaherty and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, Mexico prepared to host the Olympic games amid growing civil unrest. The spectacular sports facilities and urban redevelopment projects built by the government in Mexico City mirrored the country’s rapid but uneven modernization. In the same year, a street-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in the city. Throughout the summer, the ‘68 Movement staged protests underscoring a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement. Just ten days before the Olympics began, nearly three hundred student protestors were massacred by the military in a plaza at the core of a new public housing complex. In spite of institutional denial and censorship, the 1968 massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary Mexican culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia. In this highly original study of the afterlives of the ’68 Movement, George F. Flaherty explores how urban spaces—material but also literary, photographic, and cinematic—became an archive of 1968, providing a framework for de facto modes of justice for years to come.

Download or read book Dwelling Urbanism written by Christian von Wissel and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2019-09-23 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City dwellers are direct agents in the making of cities; yet how do they actually constitute and sustain the urban and its forms? How do they practice the urban and through this practice shape the city-in-the-making that emerges along with them on the backs of their working bodies? Dwelling Urbanism re-thinks the urban from this perspective of corporeal making and with regard to the cityness that it bears. It delves into the thick of life in the periphery of Mexico City, uncovering the everyday actions and efforts that practitioners of space accomplish when building houses, creating jobs and putting themselves to work as infrastructure. How are consequential conjunctions, how is access to, and presence in the city actively grown? And what does such thinking the city as a verb, as citying, imply for urban planning?

Download or read book Human Settlement Development Volume IV written by Saskia Sassen and published by EOLSS Publications. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Settlement Development is a component of Encyclopedia of Institutional and Infrastructural Resources in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Human Settlement Development deals, in nine parts and four volumes , with a myriad of issues of great relevance to our world such as: Urban Sustainability and the Regional City System in the Asia Pacific; Peri-Urbanization: Zones of Rural - Urban Transition; Urban Sustainability: Theoretical Perspectives on Integrating Economic Development and the Environment; Rural Sustainability; Using Foreign Direct Investment to Improve Urban Environmental Infrastructure and Services- The Case of Hanoi, Vietnam; The Long Road Towards Sustainable Cities: The Dutch case; Urban Dimensions of Sustainable Development; Rural Development: Participation and Diversity for Sustainability; The Cities, the State and the Markets: In Search of Sustainability These four volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.

Download or read book Urban Climate and Adaptation Tools written by Teodoro Georgiadis and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is pressing evidence of phenomena, linked to meteorology and climate, which are modifying their temporal occurrence and which have a very evident impact on the safety and health of populations residing in cities. The urban problem at the beginning of the second set of twenty years of the new century requires a complete rethinking of the way of aggregation of man who, today, represents a large part of the world population due to increasingly accelerated urbanization processes over time. The human being has become a citizen, and within the city limits, he tries to develop his life expectancy by seizing opportunities from this. This search for well-being, understood as a complete state of man, at once physiological and psychological and social, can be thwarted by an urban structure that is not functionally capable of providing answers. The climate problem exacerbates this problem by strongly stressing the contradictions of living. Science, technology, and politics are today able to give answers if applied wisely in a joint effort, in a unit of language. This book proposes several solutions that can be implemented today, ranging from a full understanding of phenomena to adaptation policies for solving problems. The most pressing invitation is addressed precisely to politics to make cities more resilient and safe.

Download or read book Water and Development Volume II written by Catherine M .Marquette and published by EOLSS Publications. This book was released on 2009-08-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water and Development is a component of Encyclopedia of Water Sciences, Engineering and Technology Resources in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. Water is perhaps the most critical natural resource upon which humans depend. Agricultural and food production, trade and ultimately the economic development of all regions of the world depend on rivers, streams, dams, oceans and other water resources. This critical relationship has persisted through the agricultural and industrial revolution and into the era of economic globalization. The relationship between human activity and the water resources on which it depends also continues to be reciprocal. Human consumption, energy, agricultural, industrial and other economic activity have significant impacts on water quality and quantity for better or worse. A key element of sustainable development rests on our global capacity to interact with the water resources on which we depend in ways that preserve them for our use and that of future generations. The two volumes on the subject present some of the topics such as Water, Agriculture and Food Interactions, dams, water valuation, arid regions, water-management, and Conflict over Water Resources, Water and Sustainable Development: They consider the implications which contributions have in each of these areas as well as introduce additional issues relating to the future of dams, innovative ways of increasing water supply, transboundary water resources, and the implications of global climate change for water resources. These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students, Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, Managers, and Decision makers and NGOs

Download or read book Planning for the Unplanned written by Aseem Inam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do cities plan for the unplanned? Do cities plan for recovery from every possible sudden shock? How does one prepare a plan for the recovery after a tragedy, like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York? The book discovers the systematic features that contribute to the success of planning institutions. In cities filled with uncertainty and complexity, planning institutions effectively tackle unexpected and sudden change by relying on the old and the familiar, rather than the new and the innovative. The author argues that planning programs institutions were successful because they were bureaucratic, and relied on standardized routines, rigorous sets of established regimes, familiar programs, and institutionalized hierarchies. Also contrary to popular perception, neither the leaders at the top of the institutions nor those workers at the grassroots level were the most important in the implementation of such routines. The key actors were middle managers, because they knew the institutional structures inside out, what the routines were and how to use them, and were successful go-betweens between national governments and grassroots community groups. Case studies from Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York provide a deeper understanding of urban planning processes. The case studies reveal that systematic institutional analysis helps us understand what works in planning, and why. They also demonstrate the manner in which institutional routines serve as powerful and effective tools for addressing novel situations.

Download or read book Legalizing the City written by Tito Alegría Olazábal and published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For several decades, the phenomenon of irregularity in urban land tenure has been central element in the growth of Latin American cities. In the case of Tijuana, informal settlements have proliferated through the city’s history as a result of spectacular population growth, a significant share of the population’s lack of economic capacity to acquire housing, a limited supply of land in the real estate market for housing construction, local topographical obstacles, and institutional weaknesses in all three levels of government that prevent the orderly oversight of property rights and urban development. According to the findings of this study, more than half of currently occupied dwelling units in the Tijuana had irregular origins. In the context, the book embodies a systematic approach to the study of land tenure informality in the city. The research findings address the location and dimensions of informal settlements; their implications for housing quality and availability of basic public services and urban infrastructure, as well as implications for local real estate markets; and the limitations of the public institutions charged with housing production and supervision and with the process of land tenure regularization. The research presented here retains its currency and topicality ten years after it was carried out. This English edition is an effort to contribute to debate and analysis about one of the central issues in economic and social progress in every large city in the developing world.

Download or read book Historic Cities of the Americas 2 volumes written by David F. Marley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-09-12 with total page 1031 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With rare maps, prints, and photographs, this unique volume explores the dramatic history of the Americas through the birth and development of the hemisphere's great cities. Written by award-winning author David F. Marley, Historic Cities of the Americas covers the hard-to-find information of these cities' earliest years, including the unique aspects of each region's economy and demography, such as the growth of local mining, trade, or industry. The chronological layout, aided by the numerous maps and photographs, reveals the exceptional changes, relocations, destruction, and transformations these cities endured to become the metropolises they are today. Historic Cities of the Americas provides over 70 extensively detailed entries covering the foundation and evolution of the most significant urban areas in the western hemisphere. Critically researched, this work offers a rare look into the times prior to Christopher Columbus' arrival in 1492 and explores the common difficulties overcome by these European-conquered or -founded cities as they flourished into some of the most influential locations in the world.

Download or read book Mexico City s Water Supply written by Academia Nacional de Ingenieria, A.C. and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1995-05-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the technical, health, regulatory, and social aspects of ground water withdrawals, water use, and water quality in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, and makes recommendations to improve the balance of water supply, water demand, and water conservation. The study came about through a nongovernmental partnership between the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council and the Mexican Academies of Science and Engineering. The book will contain a Spanish-language translation of the complete English text.

Download or read book The Peri Urban Interface written by Duncan McGregor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peri-urban interfaces - the zones where urban and rural areas meet - suffer from the greatest problems to humans caused by rapid urbanization, including intense pressures on resources, slum formation, lack of adequate services such as water and sanitation, poor planning and degradation of farmland. These areas, home to hundreds of millions of people, face unique problems and need distinctive and innovative approaches and solutions. This book, authored by top researchers and practitioners, covers the full breadth and depth of the impacts of rapid urbanization on livelihoods, poverty and resources in the peri-urban zones in diverse African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Topics include peri-urban resource sustainability, ecosystems and societies and environmental changes in peri-urban zones. Rich case studies cover production systems and livelihoods including the impacts of irrigated vegetable production, horticulture, dairy enterprises, waste-fed fisheries and pastoral livelihoods. Also addressed are planning and development issues in the peri-urban interface including the difficulty in achieving sustainability, conflict and cooperation over resources, and a fresh look at the relationship between people and their environment. The final part of the book presents policies and strategies for promoting and measuring sustainability in peri-urban zones including community-based waste management, the co-management of watersheds and empowerment of the poor. This book is the most comprehensive examination of the challenges and solutions facing the people and environments of peri-urban zones and is essential reading for all practitioners, students and academics in geography and development.