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Lower real incomes in the agricultural sector compared with other sectors of the economy have led to continued migration of rural people xi to urban areas. Despite this movement of surplus people from farm areas, incomes in the rural sector have failed to keep pace with those in urban areas. Fewer social amenities and other conveniences have also contributed to rural-urban migration. This reduction in rural population and the consequent reduction in the economic bases of many rural communities has raised some interesting questions about city and rural government consolidation. What sizes of cities should be encouraged in the rural areas, and how can those services and other amenities which are provided in urban cities be supplied to rural areas. For planning efforts to be successful in solving these problems, it is essential to have some knowledge of the sizes of cities which can provide public services and other amenities at least cost. It was assumed in this study that the tendency for farm families to move their families into the towns and ci t ies had been completed. It was hypothesized that as cities become larger economies of scale in the provision of public services will be downward sloping, but that transportation costs associated with travel to farms, marketing of crops, etc. will rise. xii The summation of a declining public service function and a rising transportation function would give an aggregate long-run average total cost function whose minimum would define the optimum city sizes. Mathematical models were developed to estimate these functions and the relationships between them. The models were then applied to five different types of farm enterprises and road configurations. The public service functions showed the expected U shape with the minimum occurring at approximately 130,000 to 140,000 population. The transportation functions were positive in nature but increasing at a decreasing rate. When the two functions were aggregated, the rate of change in the transportation function was much greater than that for the public service function causing the former to overpower the latter. Most studies of economies of scale based on per capita public service costs alone have concluded that cities must be very large to provide these services at minimum cost. The results of this study lead to the conclusion that when transportation costs are considered along with public service costs, the optimal size of city will be much smaller than is commonly believed. This suggests that there is still a place for small sized cities and that planners should think in terms of perhaps a threelevel hierarchy of cities. The city hierarchy might include a few large central cities, many service centers and numerous local towns. If small cities do not have large enough economic bases to provide adequate services it may be cheaper in the long run to provide financial aid in the form of subsidies rather than to incur the heavy transportation costs associated with larger city sizes.

Density or Intensity?There is much debate about how to measure density – dwellings per hectare, bedrooms per hectare or people per hectare; including or excluding major highways, parks and open spaces; the permanent population only or the transient one too?While this gives urban planners something to disagree about it risks missing the point: great urban places are not created by density; they are created by intensity.And the difference matters. When people describe the buzz of a marketplace they do not say, "Wow - it was so dense!". They are much more likely to say how intense it was. Density is a word used by planners. Intensity is a word that real people use, and perhaps because it describes the outcomes that people experience rather than the inputs that have gone in to creating them. It is the outcomes that are ultimately more important. But planning professionals like density. Even though density fails to capture the essence of what it feels like to be somewhere, the term appeals to professional instincts. It describes the raw ingredients that planners have to handle and, once you choose which version of the formula you are going to use, density is easy to measure. It involves a simple calculation of straightforward urban quantities such as the number of people, the number of houses or the number of bedrooms, all divided by the geographic area over which those ingredients occur. Easy.In contrast, intensity seems more difficult to pin down, not least because it appears to have a subjectively emotional dimension; it speaks of feelings, of responses, of stimuli, and this raises problems about how it can be effectively measured. But intensity is also a response to context, to place and above all to people - and here we can find clues to its measurement.Observing IntensitySo what are the factors that people are responding to when they instinctively feel the intensity of a great place? For a start, they can not be calculating a planner's measure of urban density because, even if they were so minded, they could not possibly know about populations and geographic areas when they are walking along a street or sitting at a café table on a public space.What people can respond to though is what is happening around them in the public realm: they can see how many other people there are, and they can see what these people are up to. In other words, intensity is obvious, immediate and instinctively calculable to the person in the street: not only the mobile population of walkers, drivers and cyclists but also the immobile population of sitters, leaners and pausers. Intensity has a static as well as a kinetic dimension. Indeed the stationary people are the essential ingredient of intensity. They are the people who have chosen to be there, to add to the place through their semi-permanence and not simply to pass through on the way to somewhere else. Intensity is not therefore about the population density of an area but the population that is participating in the public realm of an area. And this should be obvious. And everyday. But any attempt to emphasise the benefits of static participation runs counter to the mindset of the traffic engineer and counter to the still-persuasive, kinetic legacy of Le Corbusier, who described "grinding gears and burning gasoline" as the pleasurable objectives of the Plan Voisin.Nevertheless, intense places are sticky places and especially so when people are not only co-present in space but when they are also interacting: talking to each other, sharing thoughts, ideas, opinions. This is the essence of intensity; there is an exchange - a transaction – be it economic, social, cultural, intellectual, factual or simply facile. It is the daily public life of every thriving village, town and city. It is so apparently unremarkable as to go unnoticed, unobserved and unmeasured. Until it is not there. And that is when you feel it most clearly.A number of years ago my colleagues at Space Syntax were working on a sample of towns across the UK, some historic and some new. The towns had similar residential populations and similar retail floorspace provisions across similar geographical areas; in other words, similar densities. But what the team had also done was to count the numbers of people using the centres of each town: how many were walking and sitting in public space. They had counted over several days, from morning until evening. What they found was that the historic towns consistently had many more people using their centres than the new ones - and they knew from other evidence that the historic towns had stronger economic performances. Here then were places with similar urban densities but different intensities of human activity.What seemed to explain the differences between historic and new towns were first, the spatial layout and second, the street design of each place. The historic towns were laid out around radial streets that were designed to carry cars as well as vehicles and which met at the centre of the town in a public space. Behind these radial streets were more or less continuously connected grids of residential streets, interrupted by the occasional large open space. Both cars and pedestrians could use the residential streets, while the open spaces were generally for pedestrians only. There was some limited pedestrianisation in the very centre of each town.In contrast, the new towns often had separate street networks for vehicles and pedestrians, no high street or central public space and usually one or two enclosed shopping malls. Their central areas were typically pedestrianised and spatially separated from the surrounding residential areas by a vehicle-only ring road; these residential areas were separated from each other by large swathes of open space.To summarise, the key differences were first in the intensity of the human experience and second in the design of the street network. Intensity, it seems, is facilitated by an alignment of physical and spatial factors: having the movement-sensitive land uses on sufficiently well-connected streets that are, in the main, shared by vehicles and pedestrians.Measuring IntensityImportantly, both the amount of human activity and the degree of street connectivity are measurable commodities – if you know how. This is the professional specialism of my practice, Space Syntax, and it has two key parts: one part that takes place in the studio, using purpose-designed software that measures the amount of connectivity in street grids and the other part that happens on site using some form of counting device. This device may be a camera strapped to a lamp post or, in recent years, a drone flight. Or it may simply be a set of human eyes, a pencil and a notepad. Onto these 'foundational' datasets are added other information, which might be about air quality, land value, crime rates or health outcomes. Statistical software is employed to explore relations between the datasets: how is health or wealth or educational achievement related to spatial connectivity or isolation? The product of this process is an Integrated Urban Model: a quantitative record of urban form and urban performance. A Geographical Information System is used to hold the datasets in one place and a basic form of artificial intelligence is run to explore the links between the data.However it is possible to create a primitive version of a data platform using only PowerPoint and Excel. After all, Space Syntax began its work before the Macintosh, before colour screens, before the internet, before CAD, before GIS and long before BIM. Its observations of pedestrian movements around Trafalgar Square were done with pen and paper, the results coded manually into a simple drawing programme.What matters today is what mattered then: to bring data to life using maps and colours rather than spreadsheets and charts. To make it accessible to the audiences that will be making judgments about the future of places: investors, planning officers, politicians and local communities. Measures of intensity therefore need to speak to multiple audiences and not least to the design community, into whose creative hands is entrusted the responsibility for shaping the aspirations of stakeholders. An Integrated Urban Model must be nimble, capable of responding again and again to the short and intensive programme of a rapid design process. Beware the Smart City "Control Room" stuffed with technicians; eintegratedmbrace instead a portable platform that can respond to the timescale of a creative whim.Creating a Profession of "Urban Intensity Surveyors"So why do we not measure towns and cities in such a systematic way? Why is there not a profession of urban intensity surveyors? And a culture among architects and urban planners of designing for intense human interactions?The problems start when the responsibility for thinking about cities, streets and public spaces moves from the individual enjoying the buzz of the boulevard to the collective of professional institutes charged with creating place. Density prevails over intensity and we revert to simplifications. Assumptions are made - incorrectly as we have seen - that the quality of street life will be in direct proportion to the density of people in an area. That if we have more people then the streets will be busier and the busier the streets, the better the place. But then the counter view is quite reasonably made that people need quiet streets and so densities should not be too high. And a compromise is eventually reached for neither super high nor super low densities; neither towns that are too big nor too small. And if we need big towns then they should be broken up into manageable parcels. Since we want pedestrians then we should pedestrianise.We end up with an urbanism of averages and a morphology of enclaves through an approach that is much too simplistic to ever create great place. It is not born of science and it does not reflect human experience: people know instinctively that you can turn off the busiest street in the city and immediately find yourself on a lane that is one of the quietest; that the intensity of the urban experience can transform itself in seconds. This is one of the great joys of exploring great cities: they are not pervasively busy; they are intensely quiet as well. They have a foreground grid of busy streets and a background grid of quiet ones. If we can systematically measure urban intensity then we will understand how towns and cities work in ways that will transform practice. And by transforming practice we will transform place.The Future for IntensityThe professions will be unwise to avoid the opportunities presented by technology. Both the technologies of data capture, visualisation and analysis as well as the technologies that are affecting human behaviours: broadband, social media, augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Human activity is becoming ever more intense and this gives us another reason to systematically measure urban intensity. People are walking more slowly, ensconced in virtual worlds at the same time as participating in physical space; seeing their surroundings augmented with pop-up information. The trend will continue as AR on our smartphones becomes AR on our spectacles. As well as talking to each other we will be talking to objects on display in shops, to screens in buildings and on streets, and to ourselves – our digital twin may appear as an avatar walking alongside us in our peripheral vision or in front of us when trying on clothes for us. This intensity of communication can already be seen in early adopting countries, especially China, and it may seem strange at first. But there was a time, not long ago, when it seemed strangely ostentatious to put down a mobile phone on a table in a public place.The brain has a finite processing capacity and so what goes into handling increased visual information will have to be taken away from the control of bodily function. People may therefore adapt to the amplified intensity of visual stimuli by moving ever more slowly. We will need more space for these intense activities and the obvious place is the street, where we will need more space for people. Road space will have to narrow and footways will have to widen. We will need more places to sit and lean - to be sticky.And this presents a choice for designers: continue to disagree about the best way to measure density or embrace intensity and anticipate the radical transformation of place.

The political meaning of informal urbanisation / Roberto Rocco and Jan van Ballegooijen -- Ahmedabad : urban informality and the production of exclusion / Vrushti Mawani, Michael Leaf -- Ankara : struggles for housing : legitimate, self-contradictory or both? : impacts of clientelism and rights-seeking on informal housing in Ankara / Yelda Kizildag Özdemirli -- Balkans : informal settlements in the Balkans : squatters' magic realism vs. planners' modernist fantasy vs. governments' tolerance and opportunism / Dorina Pojani -- Beirut : Dahiye : an active space for social justice and resistance : re-imagining informality in light of growing urban marginality / Nabil Nazha -- Belo Horizonte : new urban occupations in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte and the struggle for housing rights / Maria Tereza Fonseca Dias, Juliano dos Santos Calixto, Larissa Pirchiner de Oliveira Vieira, Ananda Martins Carvalho, Carolina Spyer Vieira Assad, Lucas Nasser Marques de Souza, Fúlvio Alvarenga Sampaio, Julia Dinardi Alves Pinto, and Marcos Bernardes Rosa -- Cairo : right to the city and public space in post-revolutionary Cairo / Noheir Elgendy, Alessandro Frigerio -- Fortaleza : informal urbanization versus modernization : popular resistance in Fortaleza, Brazil / Germana Câmara , Clarissa Freitas and Beatriz Rufino -- Guangzhou : fewer contestations, more negotiations : a multi-scalar understanding of the "politics of informal urbanization" in southern China / Josefine Fokdal, Peter Herrle -- Guayaquil : conflicting competences in Guayaquil's contested and (in)formal periphery / Alina Delgado, Olga Peek, Viviana d'Auria -- Hanoi : a study of informally developed housing and its role in the political arena of a post-reform communist city / Stephanie Geertman and Boram Kim -- Harare : informality and urban citizenship : housing struggles in Hharare, Zimbabwe / Davison Muchadenyika, Molin K. Chakamba, and Patience Mguni -- Jerusalem : the multifaceted politics of informality in Jerusalem at the time of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict / Francesco Chiodelli -- Johannesburg : the political ecology of the right to the rainbow city informal spaces and practices and the quest for socio-environmental rights in urbanizing Johannesburg / Costanza La Mantia, Dylan Weakley -- Khartoum : the politics of displacement in a conflictive polity / Budoor Bukhari, Tasneem Nagi -- Lima : Lima, informal urbanization and the state : the rise and fall of urban populism in Lima / Matteo Stiglich , Adrián Lerner -- Mashhad : claiming the right to the city : informal urbanisation in the holy city of Mashhad / Elham Bahmanteymouri, Mohsen Mohammadzadeh -- Medellin : performative infrastructures : medellin's governmental technologies of informality : the case of the encircled garden project in Comuna 8 / Catalina Ortiz, Camillo Boano -- Mumbai : profit versus people : the struggle for inclusion in Mumbai / Rohan Varma, Kritika Sha -- Nairobi : the socio-political implications of informal tenement housing in Nairobi, Kenya / Miriam Maina & Baraka Mwau -- Port au Prince : Haiti's disaster urbanism : the emerging city of Canaan / Angela Sherwood, Laura Smits, Anna Konotchick -- Rio de Janeiro : tackling informality in low-income housing : the case of the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro / Alex Ferreira Magalhães -- São Paulo : Cortiços : interstitial urbanization in central São Paulo / Jeroen Stevens, Bruno De Meulder, Débora Sanches -- São Paulo : occupations : a pedagogy of confrontation : informal building occupations in São Paulo's central neighbourhoods / Alexandre Apsan Frediani, Beatrice De Carli, Benedito Roberto Barbosa, Francisco de Assis Comarú, Ricardo de Sousa Moretti -- Seoul : the evolution of informal settlers' political gains in changing state regimes in Seoul / Boram Kim, Hogeun Park, Jaehyeon Park -- Yogyakarta : slum dwellers strategies and tactics in Yogyakarta, Indonesia / Sonia Roitman.

The political meaning of informal urbanisation / Roberto Rocco and Jan van Ballegooijen -- Ahmedabad : urban informality and the production of exclusion / Vrushti Mawani, Michael Leaf -- Ankara : struggles for housing : legitimate, self-contradictory or both? : impacts of clientelism and rights-seeking on informal housing in Ankara / Yelda Kizildag Özdemirli -- Balkans : informal settlements in the Balkans : squatters' magic realism vs. planners' modernist fantasy vs. governments' tolerance and opportunism / Dorina Pojani -- Beirut : Dahiye : an active space for social justice and resistance : re-imagining informality in light of growing urban marginality / Nabil Nazha -- Belo Horizonte : new urban occupations in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte and the struggle for housing rights / Maria Tereza Fonseca Dias, Juliano dos Santos Calixto, Larissa Pirchiner de Oliveira Vieira, Ananda Martins Carvalho, Carolina Spyer Vieira Assad, Lucas Nasser Marques de Souza, Fúlvio Alvarenga Sampaio, Julia Dinardi Alves Pinto, and Marcos Bernardes Rosa -- Cairo : right to the city and public space in post-revolutionary Cairo / Noheir Elgendy, Alessandro Frigerio -- Fortaleza : informal urbanization versus modernization : popular resistance in Fortaleza, Brazil / Germana Câmara , Clarissa Freitas and Beatriz Rufino -- Guangzhou : fewer contestations, more negotiations : a multi-scalar understanding of the "politics of informal urbanization" in southern China / Josefine Fokdal, Peter Herrle -- Guayaquil : conflicting competences in Guayaquil's contested and (in)formal periphery / Alina Delgado, Olga Peek, Viviana d'Auria -- Hanoi : a study of informally developed housing and its role in the political arena of a post-reform communist city / Stephanie Geertman and Boram Kim -- Harare : informality and urban citizenship : housing struggles in Hharare, Zimbabwe / Davison Muchadenyika, Molin K. Chakamba, and Patience Mguni -- Jerusalem : the multifaceted politics of informality in Jerusalem at the time of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict / Francesco Chiodelli -- Johannesburg : the political ecology of the right to the rainbow city informal spaces and practices and the quest for socio-environmental rights in urbanizing Johannesburg / Costanza La Mantia, Dylan Weakley -- Khartoum : the politics of displacement in a conflictive polity / Budoor Bukhari, Tasneem Nagi -- Lima : Lima, informal urbanization and the state : the rise and fall of urban populism in Lima / Matteo Stiglich , Adrián Lerner -- Mashhad : claiming the right to the city : informal urbanisation in the holy city of Mashhad / Elham Bahmanteymouri, Mohsen Mohammadzadeh -- Medellin : performative infrastructures : medellin's governmental technologies of informality : the case of the encircled garden project in Comuna 8 / Catalina Ortiz, Camillo Boano -- Mumbai : profit versus people : the struggle for inclusion in Mumbai / Rohan Varma, Kritika Sha -- Nairobi : the socio-political implications of informal tenement housing in Nairobi, Kenya / Miriam Maina & Baraka Mwau -- Port au Prince : Haiti's disaster urbanism : the emerging city of Canaan / Angela Sherwood, Laura Smits, Anna Konotchick -- Rio de Janeiro : tackling informality in low-income housing : the case of the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro / Alex Ferreira Magalhães -- São Paulo : Cortiços : interstitial urbanization in central São Paulo / Jeroen Stevens, Bruno De Meulder, Débora Sanches -- São Paulo : occupations : a pedagogy of confrontation : informal building occupations in São Paulo's central neighbourhoods / Alexandre Apsan Frediani, Beatrice De Carli, Benedito Roberto Barbosa, Francisco de Assis Comarú, Ricardo de Sousa Moretti -- Seoul : the evolution of informal settlers' political gains in changing state regimes in Seoul / Boram Kim, Hogeun Park, Jaehyeon Park -- Yogyakarta : slum dwellers strategies and tactics in Yogyakarta, Indonesia / Sonia Roitman.

'Destined Statecraft enriches our understanding of global affairs by presenting a perspective where small powers are no longer in the periphery, but take up the main narrative. This standpoint is all the more valuable in an age where the proactive decision-making of small powers often goes unobser ved. Professor Wong's Destined Statecraft offers a fresh lens for discerning world issues, helping to extend the reader's vision beyond the exterior towards a greater perception of the world we live in.' --Mr Sungnam Lim, Vice-Minister of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea This book considers the post-2010 strategic shifts in the Anglo-American geopolitical approach to Asia as a pivotal new strategy in the U.S. geo- strategic containment plan, which has been reformed to rebalance the rise of China and the Eurasian heartland in the course of the two decades since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. At this critical global-historical juncture, the People's Republic of China has also devised a new counter-containment endeavor - the 'One Belt One Road' initiative, which aims to re-connect it with all the countries on the Eurasian landmass, forming a single community. Against this backdrop of the intensifying geopolitical and geo-economic competition between the U.S. and China, this book calls for the revival and reinvigoration of selected Eurasian small powers' embedded geopolitical, political-economic and strategic-cultural structures. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, the book argues that these self- changing and unceasingly structuring structures do not only constrain and limit, but also enable and galvanize small powers' strategists and policy- makers to proactively generate creative means-and-ends calculations, conduct prudent security assessments, and devise measured and responsive strategic deployments. In this context, the book proposes that the small powers return to their own religious, cultural and intellectual roots. It also argues for the need to rediscover their own strategic cultures as an essential means of re-inventing and implementing their own unique models of national development. As a substantial contribution to the subfields of small power politics and strategic cultures in international relations, the book marks a paradigm shift in both theory and practice. Exploring historical case studies from such diverse African, Asian and European powers as the Philippines, Liberia, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, the European Union, Ukraine, Poland and the United Kingdom as well as China, the book presents engaging dialogues with a wealth of classical and contemporary Western and non-Western strategic thinkers, including: Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Halford Mackinder, Kautilya, King Solomon, Li Zongwu, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Karl Haushofer, Carl Schmitt and the Malayo-Polynesian datu, as well as John Mearsheimer. In light of the post- 2017 U.S. 'America First' foreign policy agenda, this book represents an essential guide for small powers' strategists, foreign policy-makers, security practitioners and national development planners - introducing them to a broader spectrum of strategic options that will help them not just survive, but thrive in the constantly shifting geopolitical currents of our time.

On this day, in 1899, the Nobel economist and social theorist Friedrich Hayek was born. He was, in the words of Robert Skidelsky, "the dominant intellectual influence of the last quarter of the twentieth century".Hayek was the driving force that kept alive the spirit of personal and economic freedom that had been crushed by the Second World War and the Keynesian economic experiment that followed it. Those who think they can rationally design a better society, he argued, suffer from the 'fatal conceit' that we know far more about how society works than we really do. Governments simply could not collect and process all the information needed to run a functioning economy, because that information is dispersed, diffuse, incomplete and personal. The socialist dream would always be frustrated by reality; and as socialists struggled to control things, we would be drawn down a road to serfdom.Societies do not need to be planned in order to be rational and functional. Their rules and customs contain a 'wisdom' that has stood the test of time. A wisdom that we cannot even understand, never mind control. The price system, for example, allocates resources to their most urgent uses, with a speed and efficiency that defies any government planners. Such 'spontaneous orders' (including not just markets but language, justice and much else) were, said Hayek, products of social evolution, not rational design. Trying to replace them with some planned 'rational' alternative always ends in disappointment and chaos.Hayek influenced a generation of economists, including many others who would also win the Nobel Prize, such as Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Maurice Allais, James Buchanan, Vernon Smith, Gary Becker, Ronald Coase and Elinor Ostrom. His ideas also enthused intellectuals who in turn disseminated his ideas even more widely. Among them were Henry Hazlitt, journalist and co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Education; Ralph (later Lord) Harris and Arthur Seldon who ran the Institute of Economic Affairs; F A ("Baldy") Harper who founded the Institute for Humane Studies, and Eamonn Butler and Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute.These thinkers and activists gave Hayek's ideas a real political effect. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan owed much to his thinking, as did Mart Laar and Vaclav Klaus, who became political leaders in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet system. "No person," concluded Milton Friedman, "had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek."Hayek remains an inspiration to lovers of individual freedom all over the world. Think tanks promote his view; student groups name themselves after him; college programmes take his name; economists and journalists cite him; his views are analysed in books, papers and blogs. Millions of ordinary people around the world owe to Hayek their enjoyment of the fruits of personal and academic freedom, even though they may not realise it; but then as Hayek pointed out, knowledge is not always obvious.Eamonn Butler is author of Friedrich Hayek: The Ideas and Influence of the Libertarian Economist (Harriman Economics Essentials).

Traditional settlements are societies and villages that emerged vernacularly; they have a distinct architectural typology and urban tissue, transferring knowledge between generations is a significant character. Their inhabitants have significant levels of agreement about their social qualities, homogeneity, solving any problem in their ways. They use the available resources, local materials, and the available technologies to form their shelters concerning the climate, security, political and religious precepts, and aesthetic values. Their buildings achieve cultural, anthropological, social, and economic needs. Several studies found common ground between Egypt and Italy regarding the impact of Arab and Roman cultures and the influence of the Mediterranean climate. This research has chosen a common traditional settlement pattern to foster a new approach. Based on several factors, namely, adjacent to the Mediterranean sea, Mediterranean climate, population density, buildings number, predominately rural, land use is dominated by agriculture, and they have the same small-dimension economy of agricultural activities, and finally, it makes sense the author is Egyptian, and he studies in Itlay. Moreover, the comparative analysis between contexts enriches the findings, and otherwise, they could represent the Mediterranean Region. Many studies highlighted the transformation of these traditional settlements in Egypt and Italy because of several causes, such as the socio-economic transformations that led to emerging newly built environment patterns facing environmental challenges and led to more energy consumption which contributes significantly to climate change. That requires transdisciplinary retrofitting interventions in these traditional contexts, considering evolving all stakeholders who have the interest, influence, and power of implementation, namely, the technical experts like (architects, urban planners, culture experts, and sociologists), the local community, decision-makers, and the facilitators. Thus, this study aims to provide a transdisciplinary framework to organize the collaborative work among the stakeholders to enable to implementation of efficient strategies to retrofit the built environment. The conceptual framework was developed by the integration of the relevant theoretical concepts in three domains (software development, project management, and energy retrofitting practices). The transdisciplinary framework will employ Agile Methodology (Agile Manifesto, 2001), which originated in 2001 under the software development domain. It efficiently organizes and manages the relations between teamwork, producing the highest-value products (services), achieving client satisfaction, and continuous acclimatization due to fluctuations and variations. Likewise, this study argues that it can provide the optimum framework to mitigate conflict, enhance communication maximize relations efficiency between the stakeholders, and provide criteria to select the teams under different circumstances and various projects. The framework has been implemented in two similar traditional settlement case studies, Lasaifar Albalad in the Delta Region in Egypt and Pontinia in the Lazio region in Italy. It was validated using focus group techniques. The results showed that the framework had improved the participatory approach, enhanced communication, mitigated team conflict problems, supported decision-making, and it led to engaging top-down stakeholders, and it led to versatile juxtapositioning (bottom-up with top-down) stakeholders on the same influence and interest zone. Moreover, the framework led to implementing an actual retrofitting case study that benefits the local community and supports the national policies.

AbstractAs materializations of trends toward developing and implementing urban socio-technical and enviro-economic experiments for transition, eco-cities have recently received strong government and institutional support in many countries around the world due to their ability to function as an innovative strategic niche where to test and introduce various reforms. There are many models of the eco-city based mainly on either following the principles of urban ecology or combining the strategies of sustainable cities and the solutions of smart cities. The most prominent among these models are sustainable integrated districts and data-driven smart eco-cities. The latter model represents the unprecedented transformative changes the eco-city is currently undergoing in light of the recent paradigm shift in science and technology brought on by big data science and analytics. This is motivated by the growing need to tackle the problematicity surrounding eco-cities in terms of their planning, development, and governance approaches and practices. Employing a combination of both best-evidence synthesis and narrative approaches, this paper provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art and thematic literature review on sustainable integrated districts and data-driven smart eco-cities. The latter new area is a significant gap in and of itself that this paper seeks to fill together with to what extent the integration of eco-urbanism and smart urbanism is addressed in the era of big data, what driving factors are behind it, and what forms and directions it takes. This study reveals that eco-city district developments are increasingly embracing compact city strategies and becoming a common expansion route for growing cities to achieve urban ecology or urban sustainability. It also shows that the new eco-city projects are increasingly capitalizing on data-driven smart technologies to implement environmental, economic, and social reforms. This is being accomplished by combining the strengths of eco-cities and smart cities and harnessing the synergies of their strategies and solutions in ways that enable eco-cities to improve their performance with respect to sustainability as to its tripartite composition. This in turn means that big data technologies will change eco-urbanism in fundamental and irreversible ways in terms of how eco-cities will be monitored, understood, analyzed, planned, designed, and governed. However, smart urbanism poses significant risks and drawbacks that need to be addressed and overcome in order to achieve the desired outcomes of ecological sustainability in its broader sense. One of the key critical questions raised in this regard pertains to the very potentiality of the technocratic governance of data-driven smart eco-cities and the associated negative implications and hidden pitfalls. In addition, by shedding light on the increasing adoption and uptake of big data technologies in eco-urbanism, this study seeks to assist policymakers and planners in assessing the pros and cons of smart urbanism when effectuating ecologically sustainable urban transformations in the era of big data, as well as to stimulate prospective research and further critical debates on this topic.

Background: Agriculture is among the relevant factors for the formation of cities and it has been an integral part of city life throughout history. Despite the increase in population growth, urban agriculture can offer a unique opportunity for improving the livelihood of individuals through the practice of growing food in urban green spaces. Nevertheless, maintaining urban green spaces as part of the urban fabric presents a unique challenge in an environment where there is a shortage of housing and urban space is limited for development. Allotment gardens might be seen as compensation for the lack of green space and private gardens in cities, especially in dense urban areas. However, due to the long waiting list for renting out, not everyone can get access to growing locally cultivated food and other benefits, especially people who are less privileged and cannot afford private gardens. Objective: The aim of this thesis, therefore, was to design a proposal for urban green space, Ekebydalen, to show how to integrate allotment gardening with other social activities. Also, as an input to the proposal, the history of allotment gardens and the theory of sustainable wellbeing was reviewed, and local public participation was investigated. Method: Literature was extensively reviewed in an attempt to identify relevant studies and better understand the context and characteristics of allotment gardens from a social and environmental context, the change in its land use, and accessibility; all in the perspective of the general development of urban agriculture and specifically in allotment movement through history in Sweden. Moreover, Site observation was conducted in a purposely selected allotment garden, Ekebydalen, Uppsala city. Also, an online and paper-based self-administered cross-sectional survey was done among 40 participants. Result: 6 different allotment gardens were observed and characterized. Based on the case study (observation), the Ekebydalen allotment garden was chosen as the main site for further pro-posal development. (60%) of the respondents in the survey were middle-aged (30 -50 years old) women (77.5%), most of them with university education (88%) and Swedish background (90%). Despite the participants has reported living in close proximity to the gardens, around a fourth of them reported having waited for more than six months. Gardening and nature interest (100%), socializing (15%), food complement (62%), and maintaining wellbeing (65%) are the motivation for renting allotment gardens. Conclusion: This thesis argues that the economic and wellbeing values of allotment gardens are perceived as highly significant compared to the social benefit that is allegedly seen less. Nevertheless, the social value can be seen as equally important if integrated as an activity with other social activities in a city, especially in urban communities that don't have enough space for gardening and are caught in their busy lives. Moreover, a design strategy was proposed to show how the allotment garden can be integrated as an activity for cultivation and recreation use (Cultivation park). This thesis has also implied that policy support, institutional recognition, and strong political will from policymakers and planners are required to bring urban agriculture into city planning for improving the quality of life for the people living and working in cities.

Physical inactivity increases the risk of many non-communicable diseases. The built environment is an important determinant of physical activity and the ways in which places are designed and built may lock in, or out, opportunities for greater physical activity and improved health outcomes. Policies and guidelines support the creation of active living infrastructure (walking and cycling infrastructure and open spaces); however, local social, environmental and political context may influence what is built in practice. The aim of this mixed methods thesis is to investigate what influences the creation of new active living infrastructure across different contexts. It also explores the value of different methods to demonstrate impacts of new walking and cycling infrastructure. The first two studies are qualitative investigations exploring decision-making for active living infrastructure across three areas of England and in Jamaica. These involve semi-structured interviews with public health practitioners, urban and transport planners, environmental and civil society stakeholders and councillors. I then synthesise the findings from these studies to gain additional insights from across different country contexts. Building on the qualitative study findings, I investigate quantitatively the association of context with use, users and benefit-cost ratios of new walking and cycling infrastructure, using repeat cross-sectional data from 84 new walking and cycling schemes in the United Kingdom (Sustrans' Connect2 programme). I also explore the association between use and physical activity using pragmatic monitoring data from Connect2 alongside more scientifically rigorous longitudinal cohort data from three of those schemes (the iConnect study). My final qualitative study follows on to investigate issues about perceptions of contextual relevance of case study examples. This involves semi-structured interviews with a sub-sample of participants from the first England qualitative study, using Connect2 walking and cycling route examples and results from my quantitative analysis as discussion prompts. I identified three themes in this thesis: how to bridge the gap between policy and practice for creating active living infrastructure; issues of inequality; and synthesising evaluations across contexts. I find that the benefits of active living infrastructure can be under-valued and suggest that formal and informal roles can facilitate sharing of believable stories, including case studies, to influence decision-makers. Whilst new walking and cycling infrastructure is associated with large relative increases in pedestrians and cyclists, and increases in physical activity, lack of monitoring and evaluation, reliance on market forces, and views on individual agency may be detrimental to tackling inequality. Greater collaboration between public health practitioners and non-health sectors could emphasise multi-sectoral outcomes of active living infrastructure, including wider economic impacts. ; Funding was provided by the Medical Research Council [grant number MC_UU_12015/6]. The work was undertaken by the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR), a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence. Funding from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research, and the Wellcome Trust, under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, is gratefully acknowledged.

African cities increasingly aspire global recognition and this has prompted a rapid transformation of the built environment in many urban locales. This thesis provides empirical and conceptual insights into this recent trend through a critical analysis of contemporary land use changes in the Greater Accra Region, Ghana. More specifically, this thesis examines the prevailing discourses on desirable urban development amongst urban planners and policy makers in this city region; how and by whom certain city visions are integrated into the built environment; how certain marginalised groups (represented by 'informal' street vendors and former residents of an 'informal settlement') respond to dominant city visions; and the socio-spatial consequences of contemporary urban interventions. The present thesis is based upon three qualitative case studies of transforming urban areas in the Greater Accra Region. The methods used include semi-structured interviews, observations and policy analysis. Theoretically, this thesis combines critical urban theory, the governmentality perspective and post-colonial urban theory to examine different aspects of the processes behind changing land uses and their consequences. The three cases are analysed in separate papers and discussed together in a comprehensive summary. The first paper analyses the logics behind a state-led demolition of a centrally located informal settlement. The paper shows that 'conflicting rationalities' exist between marginalised residents of informal settlements and state actors regarding their understanding of Accra's built environment. While the demolished settlement constituted a place of affordable housing, place-specific livelihood strategies and sociability to the former residents, state authorities perceived the neighbourhood as problematic and made use of market-driven, 'generative' and 'dispositional' rationalities to justify the demolition and make space for new urban developments. The second paper explores the everyday governance of informal street trade in Osu, a rapidly transforming inner suburb of Accra. The paper highlights the important role played by individual landowners in the regulation of street trade in public space and demonstrates that street vendors, state authorities and landowners express ambiguous attitudes on the contemporary and future presence of informal trading in Accra due to prevailing aspirations of making Accra a globally recognised city. The third paper analyses the planning and materialisation of Appolonia City, a new satellite city under construction in peri-urban Accra. The paper demonstrates that far-reaching processes of privatisation in terms of land ownership, urban planning and city management are taking place through this project. Appolonia City has been enabled by state- and traditional authorities, together with the private developer, on the basis of multiple rationalities. The paper suggests that Appolonia City will become an elite development in contrast to the project's stated goal of social sustainability. On the basis of the aggregated findings of the three case studies, this thesis concludes that a strong 'global city' ideal informs contemporary urban transformation in the Greater Accra Region; that the privatisation of communal land plays a key role in enabling (new types of) urban intervention; and that the needs of the urban poor are largely disregarded in these processes. ; At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript.

The purpose of this study was (1) to identify visitors behaviors in and perceptions of linear parks, (2) to identify social media users behaviors in and perceptions of linear parks, and (3) to compare small data with big data. This chapter discusses the main findings and their implications for practitioners such as landscape architects and urban planners. It has three sections. The first addresses the main findings in the order of the research questions at the center of the study. The second describes implications and recommendations for practitioners. The final section discusses the limitations of the study and suggests directions for future work. This study compares two methods of data collection, focused on activities and benefits. The survey asked respondents to check all the activities they did in the park. Social media users activities were detected by term frequency in social media data. Both results ordered the activities similarly. For example social interaction and art viewing were most popular on the High Line, then the 606, then the High Bridge according to both methods. Both methods also reported that High Line visitors engaged in viewing from overlooks the most. As for benefits, according to both methods vistors to the 606 were more satisfied than High Line visitors with the parks social and natural benefits. These results suggest social media analytics can replace surveys when the textual information is sufficient for analysis. Social media analytics also differ from surveys in accuracy of results. For example, social media revealed that 606 users were interested in events and worried about housing prices and crimes, but the pre-designed survey could not capture those facts. Social media analytics can also catch hidden and more general information: through cluster analysis, we found possible reasons for the High Lines success in the arts and in the New York City itself. These results involve general information that would be hard to identify through a survey. On the other hand, surveys provide specific information and can describe visitors demographics, motivations, travel information, and specific benefits. For example, 606 users tend to be young, high-income, well educated, white, and female. These data cannot be collected through social media. ; Doctor of Philosophy ; Turning unused infrastructure into green infrastructure, such as linear parks, is not a new approach to managing brownfields. In the last few decades, changes in the industrial structure and the development of transportation have had a profound effect on urban spatial structure. As the need for infrastructure, which played an important role in the development of past industry, has decreased, many industrial sites, power plants, and military bases have become unused. This study identifies new ways of collecting information about a new type of park, linear parks, using a new method, social media analytics. The results are then compared with survey results to establish the credibility of social media analytics. Lastly, shortcomings of social media analytics are identified. This study is meaningful in helping us understand the users of new types of parks and suggesting design and planning strategies. Regarding methodology, this study also involves evaluating the use of social media analytics and its advantages, disadvantages, and reliability.

Climate change and rapid urbanization are major concerns in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The empirical evidence on the reciprocal impact of urbanization and climate change demands interdisciplinary integration and cross cutting between both aspects on various levels to help in the mitigation and the adaptation policies. Interventions should focus on strengthening the capacity of the MENA countries to make their development more resilient to climate. As the complexity of the urban planning process increases, the demand of a platform to cross cut different data using computational and parametric techniques increases. The ability to generate, simulate and assess multiple scenarios opens up the limitations in the traditional rigid process. The Northern Mediterranean Coast of Egypt is one of the most vulnerable areas in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Rising sea levels, severe storms, droughts, hotter summers and colder winters are just some of the threats cities face from a changing climate. Urban planners need to be able to take into account these and other effects of climate change to be able to reduce their impact on the urban environment, the economy and people. Finding the synergies between mitigation and adaptation strategies instead of the dichotomy that has been followed in the past is key to a resilient development. The challenges facing this resilient development are in the content as well as the process. A methodological urban planning approach, in which climatic parameters are integrated into the planning process to create a prototype for the resilient city is the aim of this research. This study is an attempt to construct a model for the ARM'D City (Adapted, Resilient, Mitigated Development for the city) to become a pilot model that could serve as a benchmark for similar developments. Various strategies generation based on a defined framework and computational models through a decision making tool which acts as a facilitator to integrate climate recommendations in the planning process is the outcome. A final criticism of the strategies is conducted showing the achievability and viability of the proposals. ; Der Klimawandel und die rasche Verstädterung sind die Hauptanliegen in der Region des Nahen Ostens und Nordafrikas (MENA). Die empirische Evidenz über die wechselseitigen Auswirkungen von Urbanisierung und Klimawandel erfordert eine interdisziplinäre Integration und die Verknüpfung beider Aspekte auf verschiedenen Ebenen, um die Politik der Eindämmung und Anpassung zu unterstützen. Die Interventionen sollten sich auf die Stärkung der Fähigkeit der MENA-Länder konzentrieren, ihre Entwicklung klimaresistenter zu gestalten. Mit zunehmender Komplexität des Städtebauprozesses steigt der Bedarf an einer Plattform, die es ermöglicht, verschiedene Daten mit Hilfe von Berechnungs- und Parametriertechniken zu überkreuzen. Die Fähigkeit, mehrere Szenarien zu generieren, zu simulieren und zu bewerten, öffnet die Grenzen des traditionellen, starren Prozesses. Die nördliche Mittelmeerküste Ägyptens ist eines der anfälligsten Gebiete im Nahen Osten und in Nordafrika (MENA). Steigende Meeresspiegel, schwere Stürme, Dürreperioden, heißere Sommer und kältere Winter sind nur einige der Bedrohungen, denen die Städte durch ein sich veränderndes Klima ausgesetzt sind. Stadtplaner müssen in der Lage sein, diese und andere Auswirkungen des Klimawandels zu berücksichtigen, um ihre Auswirkungen auf die städtische Umwelt, die Wirtschaft und die Menschen zu verringern. Die Suche nach Synergien zwischen Minderungs- und Anpassungsstrategien statt der bisher verfolgten Dichotomie ist der Schlüssel zu einer widerstandsfähigen Entwicklung. Die Herausforderungen, die sich dieser widerstandsfähigen Entwicklung stellen, liegen sowohl im Inhalt als auch im Prozess. Ein methodischer Ansatz in der Stadtplanung, bei dem klimatische Parameter in den Planungsprozess integriert werden, um einen Prototyp für die widerstandsfähige Stadt zu schaffen, ist das Ziel dieser Forschung. Diese Studie ist ein Versuch, ein Modell für die ARM'D-Stadt (Adapted, Resilient, Mitigated Development for the City) zu konstruieren, um ein Pilotmodell zu schaffen, das als Maßstab für ähnliche Entwicklungen dienen könnte. Das Ergebnis ist die Entwicklung verschiedener Strategien auf der Grundlage eines definierten Rahmens und von Berechnungsmodellen durch ein Entscheidungsfindungsinstrument, das als Vermittler zur Integration von Klimaempfehlungen in den Planungsprozess dient. Eine abschließende Kritik an den Strategien wird durchgeführt, die die Erreichbarkeit und Durchführbarkeit der Vorschläge zeigt.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of central and eastern Europe were eager to reshape their societies both in terms of transforming the social system and upgrading the physical environment. The European transport network policies were considered an appropriate instrument for the latter. More importantly, the transport policies highly affected spatial development as they preceded the first European spatial policies. As Serbia suffered from internal social and political problems, it was excluded from the support offered to the European Union Member States. However, due to the geopolitical importance of the Western Balkans, the entire region has become an interesting target for investments from Russia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. In extreme need of an economic upturn, the Western Balkan states are usually forced to accept the conditions of foreign investors, no matter what the consequences for society and space. An example that illustrates such ad-hoc political decisions is the Belgrade Waterfront project, which is growing on an 90-ha area, including the recently closed railway station and its shunting yard. As spatial planners and other relevant experts are considered too weak to oppose the political regime, and as the only true critics of the project came from citizen organizations, the paper highlights the role of the civil sector, considering it a tool for transforming the spatial planning approach of a transitional society. Critical analysis of both the regulatory and institutional framework of spatial planning in Serbia indicates a paradox: on the one hand, formal documents highlighting the need for and the role of the civil sector exist, but they are not implemented in spatial planning practice; on the other hand, the mechanisms for active participation have already been developed by the civil sector, however, the institutional framework necessary for formalizing these informal instruments is missing. Solving this issue is a small step towards the progress of Serbian spatial governance, still in transition. ; Nach dem Fall der Berliner Mauer waren die mittel- und osteuropäischen Länder bestrebt, ihre Gesellschaften umzugestalten, sowohl im Hinblick auf die Transformation des Sozialsystems als auch auf die Verbesserung der Lebens- und Umweltbedingungen. Die europäischen Strategien für die Verkehrsnetze wurden in diesem Zusammenhang als geeignetes Instrument angesehen. Noch wichtiger ist, dass die Verkehrspolitik die Raumentwicklung stark beeinflusst hat, da sie der ersten europäischen Raumordnungspolitik vorausging. Da Serbien unter internen sozialen und politischen Schwierigkeiten litt, wurde es von der Unterstützung ausgeschlossen, die den Mitgliedstaaten der Europäischen Union gewährt wurde. Aufgrund der geopolitischen Bedeutung des Westbalkans ist die gesamte Region jedoch zu einem interessanten Investitionsstandort für Russland, China, die Türkei und die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate geworden. Die westlichen Balkanstaaten, die einen wirtschaftlichen Aufschwung dringend benötigen, sind in der Regel gezwungen, die Bedingungen ausländischer Investoren zu akzeptieren, unabhängig von den Folgen für Gesellschaft und Raum. Ein Beispiel für solche politischen Ad-hoc-Entscheidungen ist das auf einer Fläche von 90 Hektar entstehende Projekt Belgrade Waterfront, einschließlich des kürzlich geschlossenen zentralen Bahnhofs und seines Rangierbahnhofs. Da Raumplaner und andere einschlägige Experten als nicht in der Lage angesehen werden, sich dem politischen System zu widersetzen, und da die einzig relevante Kritik zum Projekt von Bürgerorganisationen kam, stellt der Beitrag die Rolle des Zivilsektors heraus und betrachtet ihn als ein Instrument zur Transformation des Raumplanungsansatzes einer Übergangsgesellschaft. Die kritische Analyse sowohl des regulatorischen als auch des institutionellen Rahmens der Raumordnung in Serbien deutet auf ein Paradoxon hin: Einerseits gibt es formelle Dokumente, die die Notwendigkeit und die Rolle des zivilen Sektors hervorheben, die aber nicht in der Raumordnungspraxis umgesetzt werden. Andererseits wurden die Verfahren der aktiven Beteiligung bereits vom zivilen Sektor entwickelt, jedoch fehlt der für die Etablierung dieser informellen Instrumente notwendige institutionelle Rahmen. Sich dieses Problems zu widmen, ist ein kleiner Schritt zur Förderung der serbischen Raumordnung, die sich noch im Übergang befindet.

Prior to 1991, India was mired in economic stagnation related to a bloated public sector, opaque business regulations and an inefficient industrialization policy based on import substitution. To avert an incipient foreign exchange crisis, the government introduced a raft of liberal reforms including reduced import taxes, market deregulation, and incentives for foreign investment. These reforms have largely been responsible for the consistently high GDP growth India has experienced since 1991, driven by entry of foreign capital and advancements in the services sector. However, the wealthy have been the greatest beneficiaries of this growth, as earnings inequality between the top and bottom 10% of the population doubled between 1991 and 2013. ICT has been the largest enabler of this rapid growth by making India's comparative advantage in the service sector accessible to the global economy. India has grown into a giant in the global services outsourcing industry, and concurrent increases in digital talent have propelled India's information technology industry into becoming a major player both domestically and abroad. China experienced a similar trajectory, as economic opening and reform over the period from 1978 to 1989 was followed by ambitious government promotion of specific cities as global manufacturing hubs. Low labor costs and business-friendly policies within Special Economic Zones (SEZs) attracted initial foreign investments, snowballing as the region developed into a manufacturing hub. As skill in the manufacturing sector increased, particularly in the hardware and electronics industries, China has risen up the value chain to develop increasingly complex components indigenously. National economic planners now prioritize high-tech manufacturing, and the rise of China's gigantic tech companies has powered a simultaneous rise in the country's service industry. Incipient public investments are now targeting development and applications of Artificial Intelligence, which stands both to further elevate the manufacturing sector and place China at the center of future global economic developments. ICT, as a set of tools that can integrate users into the national economy while democratizing service delivery, provides an excellent toolkit to promote the inclusive growth that liberalization has not yet delivered in either economy. To do so, however, national policies to encourage ICT-led growth and development must be put in place. While China has largely made successful infrastructure investments to encourage digitization across the country, India continues to lag in certain key measures. In contrast, while India has introduced specific strategies to leverage AI as an engine of inclusive growth, China's AI development strategy prioritizes achieving a dominant position in the global market over using AI domestically as an engine of broad-based development. Moving forward, India should draw lessons from China's success in implementing strategic federal initiatives and developing local capacity to expand the public sector's capacity to support ICT-driven development. In addition, India should recognize the need to develop enhanced research capacity as ICT, especially AI, makes increasingly essential contributions to the economy. For its part, China should make targeted investments in ICT-driven development for sectors likely to lag behind. It should also clarify the tension between its competing priorities of maintaining stability and encouraging innovation.