This book shows the impact of globalization on Southeast Asia, which over a few decades has evolved from a loose set of war-torn ex-colonies to being a centre of global manufacturing. Focusing on cities, the authors explain the emergence of modern Southeast Asia and its increasing integration into the world economy by showing how technological change, economic development and politics have transformed the flows of goods, people and information.
This timely book calls for a paradigm shift in urban transport, which remains one of the critically uncertain aspects of the sustainability transformation of our societies. It argues that the potential of human scale thinking needs to be recognised, both in understanding people on the move in the city and within various organisations responsible for cities.
City distribution plays a key role in supporting urban lifestyles, helping to serve and retain industrial and trading activities, and contributing to the competitiveness of regional industry. This book aims to improve knowledge in this area by recognizing and evaluating the problems within the urban freight transport system.
This book explores the opportunities and challenges of the sharing economy and innovative transportation technologies with regard to urban mobility. Written by government experts, social scientists, technologists and city planners from North America, Europe and Australia, the papers in this book address the impacts of demographic, societal and economic trends and the fundamental changes arising from the increasing automation and connectivity of vehicles, smart communication technologies, multimodal transit services, and urban design. The book is based on the Disrupting Mobility Summit held in Cambridge, MA (USA) in November 2015, organized by the City Science Initiative at MIT Media Lab, the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, the LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and Politics and the Innovation Center for Mobility and Societal Change in Berlin.
This book reports on cutting-edge theories and methods for analyzing complex systems, such as transportation and communication networks and discusses multi-disciplinary approaches to dependability problems encountered when dealing with complex systems in practice. The book presents the most noteworthy methods and results discussed at the International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication (RelStat), which took place in Riga, Latvia on October 17 – 20, 2018. It spans a broad spectrum of topics, from mathematical models and design methodologies, to software engineering, data security and financial issues, as well as practical problems in technical systems, such as transportation and telecommunications, and in engineering education.
Developing countries are urbanising rapidly, and it is estimated that within a generation more than 50 per cent of the developing world's population will live in cities. Public transport policy can contribute to reducing urban poverty both directly, by providing access and mobility for the poor, as well as by facilitating economic growth. This publication examines the nature and magnitude of urban transport problems in developing and transition economies, particularly with respect to the needs of the poor. It also suggests way the World Bank and other development agencies can best support the development of sustainable urban transport policies.
Transport Communications is a ground-breaking study into the future of transporting both people and goods more efficiently. The authors examine how existing modes of transport can be made more effective by the use of modern communications technology. Examples include RFID tags, which allow goods to be tracked electronically at every stage of their journey - from the point of manufacture to the point of delivery. They show how possible future developments will continue to revolutionize transport systems, leading to better, cleaner, more cost effective systems. For example, the concept of computer-controlled rail systems, such as London's Dockland Light Railway could be taken a stage further to apply to vehicles which don't run on rails; or the smart traffic control system in Milton Keynes which sense traffic flow and adjusts signal phasing accordingly.
Because it deals with sustainably supplying cities and reducing congestion and pollution related to goods transport in urban areas, city logistics is an important field in transportation sciences. These logistics systems need to be sustainable and reliable to ensure the continued flow of goods. Logistics and Transport Modeling in Urban Goods Movement is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the main approaches and techniques used in urban goods transport modelling while addressing planning and management issues. Highlighting topics such as urban logistics, vehicle routing, and greenhouse emissions, this book is ideally designed for civil/transport engineers, planners, transport economists, geographers, computer scientists, practitioners, professionals, researchers, and students seeking current research on urban goods modelling.
A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city “It's a rare person who won't find something of interest in The Works, whether it's an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what's down a manhole.” —New York Post Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.
Cities are perhaps one of humanity's most complex creations, never finished, never definitive. They are like a journey that never ends. Their evolution is determined by their ascent into greatness or their descent into decline. They are the past, the present and the future. Cities contain both order and chaos. In them reside beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice. They can bring out the best or the worst in humankind. They are the physical manifestation of history and culture and incubators of innovation, industry, technology, entrepreneurship and creativity. Cities are the materialization of humanity's noblest ideas, ambitions and aspirations but when not planned or governed properly, can be the repository of society's ills. Cities drive national economies by creating wealth, enhancing social development and providing employment but they can also be the breeding grounds for poverty, exclusion and environmental degradation. The 21st Century is the Century of the City. Half of humanity now lives in cities, and within the next two decades, 60 per cent of the world's people will reside in urban areas. How can city planners and policymakers harmonize the various interests, diversity and inherent contradictions within cities? What ingredients are needed to create harmony between the physical, social, environmental and cultural aspects of a city and the human beings that inhabit it? This report adopts the concept of Harmonious Cities as a theoretical framework in order to understand today's urban world, and also as an operational tool to confront the most important challenges facing urban areas and their development processes. It recognizes that tolerance, diversity, social justice and good governance, all of which are inter-related, are as important to sustainable urban development as physical planning. It addresses national concerns by searching for solutions at the city level. For that purpose, it focuses on three key areas: spatial or regional harmony, which examines the main drivers of urban growth in the developing world and explores the spatial nuances of economic and social policies; social harmony, which presents and analyzes new data on urban inequalities worldwide and describes the types of shelter deprivations experienced by slum dwellers in developing world regions; and environmental harmony, which examines the role of cities in the climate change debate, and the impact of global warming on the most vulnerable cities. The report also assesses the various intangible assets within cities that contribute to harmony, such as cultural heritage, sense of place and memory and the complex set of social and symbolic relationships that give cities meaning. It argues that these intangible assets represent the soul of the city and are as important for harmonious urban development as tangible assets. Harmony within cities, argues the report, is both a journey and a destination. Published with UN-HABITAT
