Urban Fantesy

This textbook answers important questions about the ecological structure, functions and socio-ecological development of cities worldwide. It explains ecological challenges for cities of the 21st century such as resource efficiency, climate change, moderation of quality of life and resilience. The book combines theories of urban development and ecology with practical applications and case studiest worldwide. It shows that cities are by far not only problem areas but also offer great potential for a good life and that the various urban ecosystems can make a considerable contribution to this. The "eco-city" is a real goal that can be pursued step by step in a targeted manner, taking into account the local and regional context.

This book represents the latest research on urban forestry in a Malaysian context. It demonstrates that urban forestry is concerned not only with environmental enhancement, but also other aspects, such as recreation, health and well-being, and government policies. This edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of urban forestry studies from various researchers in Malaysia, and includes rich historical perspectives of urban forestry in the country. It also tackles related issues in policy. The greening of urban Malaysia in the 1970s focused primarily on beautification and was primarily the province of horticulturists, landscapers, nursery workers, town planners, and architects, with negligible inputs from foresters, particularly urban foresters. Perhaps for that reason, the term “landscaping” has been used more widely than “urban forestry” by government and private institutions, politicians, stakeholders, academicians, and the public. Nevertheless, the authors show that the concept of urban forestry is not new for developing countries such as Malaysia, where urbanization is increasing at a rapid rate. The book unpacks this demographic shift from a predominantly rural to a principally urban society.

This study aims for a wider understanding of the redevelopment processes that emerged several decades ago in downtown San Diego and now gradually spread over the downtown edges into the inner ring. Perspectively situated in the fields of urban landscape and urban border studies, the research project outlines how the eastward ‘redevelopment wave’ in San Diego contests socialized neighborhood (boundary) perceptions by transforming the former first-tier suburbs from disinvested communities into ‘urban villages’ and trendy places to be. The study shows how the redevelopment perforates, dissolves, and shifts socialized, linear neighborhood boundaries into areas that are simultaneously part of the one and the other neighborhood. In the present work, the resulting, rather undefined or stretched border areas have been referred to as hybrid urban borderlands. This notion is a novel conceptual approach that can be deemed a promising lens for future studies on neighborhood change, urban redevelopment, and socio-spatial re-interpretation beyond the context of San Diego.

This edited volume provides an essential resource for urban morphology, the study of urban forms and structures, offering a much-needed mathematical perspective. Experts on a variety of mathematical modeling techniques provide new insights into specific aspects of the field, such as street networks, sustainability, and urban growth. The chapters collected here make a clear case for the importance of tools and methods to understand, model, and simulate the formation and evolution of cities.

This book adds to the research of urban informality in the Global South with a specific focus on South Africa and Zimbabwe. It addresses the agency and the potential transformative capacity of the phenomenon of urban informality in connection with Southern African cities and towns. It adopts a political economy approach to analyse the evolution of informality in cities and its implications for urban planning.